Certification as Governance

Graeme Auld
School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Abstract
Recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of certification programs that set standards for responsible
business practices against which producers and operators may be certified to gain access to potential market
benefits. The reach of these initiatives has grown as programs now target a wide range of goods and services
and as some initiatives have expanded well beyond niche market status. This entry takes stock of this rise.
Drawing on experiences in the forest, fisheries, and coffee sectors, in particular, the entry assesses what
we know about why these programs have come to exist, how they evolve, and what consequences they
have for environmental and social problems of global concern. This entry details the degree to which certi-
fication has become institutionalized as an important governance mechanism alone and, more crucially, in
how it interacts with government policy and other private governance mechanisms.

INTRODUCTION global economic activities. Nevertheless, many questions

Across sectors of the global economy, recent decades have
witnessed a proliferation of certification programs that
set standards for responsible business practices against
which producers and operators may be certified to gain
access to potential market benefits. Initially confined to
a few specific products and often limited to niche market
status, the number and market reach of these initiatives
has notably grown. Green (p. 86–91)[1] finds and assesses
119 environmental certification initiatives across sectors
(though not all include third-party certification), and recent
estimates from 2012 indicate that 40% of global coffee pro-
duction had been certified against one of a handful of initia-
tives, with cocoa, palm oil, and tea all surpassing double-
digit market shares in their respective sectors in the same
year.[2]
The rise of certification has engendered scholarly interest
across disciplines, from political science, law, sociology,
business, geography, conservation biology, and policy
studies. As rule-making bodies that oversee the implemen-
tation of the rules they set, there are numerous points of
intersection between the research focused on certification
and research examining public administration and public
policy as units of analysis. Indeed, early work on gover-
nance versus government (e.g., Rhodes[3]) has been one
building block for those seeking to conceptualize and assess
the import of certification initiatives.
The following section takes stock of extant research to
detail how certification has been conceptualized, how its
rise has been explained, and what we know about its conse-
quences. Certification initiatives from the forest, coffee, and
fishery sectors will be used for illustrative purposes, though
some references to the experiences in other sectors are men-
tioned too. The entry, in total, details the degree to which
certification systems have been institutionalized and now
constitute an important governance mechanism steering
Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, Third Edition DOI: 10.1081/E-EPAP3-120052554
Copyright © 2015 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.
remain about the future directions of certification, particu-
larly around impacts for environmental and social outcomes
and interactions with government policy processes and
other forms of private governance.
The remainder of this entry proceeds as follows. It first
reviews how certification programs have been conceptual-
ized as a form of private governance. Second, it discusses
what is understood about their rise and development over
time. Third, it turns to questions of impacts by offering
an overview of key findings to date on what certification
has meant for social and environmental problems. Finally,
it discusses implications for the future of certification as
governance.
CONCEPTUALIZING CERTIFICATION
AS GOVERNANCE
Major research attention has been placed on conceptualiz-
ing and categorizing certification initiatives within a
broader array of private, hybrid, delegated, and non-state
governance processes.[4] Categorizations focus around the
following four issues: what problems do they seek to
address; what actors set the rules; what motivates operators
to participate; and how is compliance verified?
Problem characteristics matter as they are expected to
affect the institutions and incentives needed for compliance.
Some private rule makers, for instance, address technical
coordination to promote global standards for products,
where it can be in the interest of actors to adopt the standard
(e.g., due to network effects) even without formal institu-
tions to verify compliance.[5] Other private rule makers
focus on problems where operators will have reasons not
to comply. These programs seek to internalize social and
environmental externalities and are hence seen to need for-
mal mechanisms to verify compliance.[6,7]
1
2 Certification as Governance
Access to influence over rulemaking also varies; that
is, the degree to which multiple stakeholders are policy
participants in a program’s decision making.[8–10] At one
extreme, multiple stakeholders have influence; at the other
extreme, a single private actor—be it a company, a research
organization, or a nongovernmental organization (NGO)—
establishes the rules of an initiative. These differences have
garnered particular interest from those scholars concerned
about the democratic legitimacy of private regulators.[11–13]
The motivations operators have to participate and the
mechanisms for compliance are interrelated with the last
two points. When market efficiencies do not encourage
compliance, other motivations include: the threat of state
intervention (i.e., preempting or fending off government
regulations)[14]; a desire to influence the character of future
government rules[15]; market benefits such as customer loy-
alty, higher prices, or gaining market access and avoiding
market loss[16,17]; retaining or achieving a social license
to operate[18]; and improved productivity or efficiency to
reduce costs of production. Verification then varies from
first-party claims to second-party verification (such as
through an industry association) to external, third-party ver-
ification conducted by an external organization.
Characteristics of Certification
Certification programs, as a subset of this wider array of
initiatives, are understood to include the following four
features.[19–21] First, they set standards delineating appro-
priate production practices that focus on social and/or envi-
ronmental issues; they focus on externalities generated by
business-as-usual production in the global economy. Most
programs also include requirements for product tracking
to ensure the integrity of claims made on end products about
the certified origins of the product; this usually involves
rules about the percentage of composite products that
must be certified inputs for the product to be sold as certified
as a whole. For most programs, non-state actors set the stan-
dards,[6] though these certification standards may, and often
do, reference legal requirements (often hard law) or they
may build from legal guidelines and benchmarks (i.e.,
soft law).[22]
Second, they constitute governance systems. They have
rules and procedures that delineate how the program makes
decisions concerning matters such as the development and
revision of standards, monitoring and compliance proce-
dures, dispute resolution, and other governance functions.
These features mean these initiatives are often referred to
as “complete” regimes (see Scott[23]). Similar to above,
however, programs vary in the degree to which they provide
decision-making powers to a wide range of actors.
Third, they have some means of external verification that
operators are performing according to the program stan-
dard. This sometimes only involves certification by a single
auditor, authorized by the program (e.g., formed in 2003,
FLO Cert is the sole certifier for Fairtrade International);
in other cases, there is a formal accreditation program that
monitors several accredited certifiers on an ongoing basis
to ensure they comply with the program’s rules.[24] The
International Organic Accreditation Services, set up in
1997, performs this function for the International Federa-
tion of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM); it has
recently begun accreditation work for the Rainforest Alli-
ance and the Sustainable Agriculture Network and other
organic schemes, including the European and Canadian
organic regimes.[25] Accreditation Services International,
which was formed by the Forest Stewardship Council
(FSC) in 2006, now performs accreditation for the FSC,
the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the Roundtable
on Sustainable Palm Oil, and the Roundtable on Sustainable
Biomaterials.[26]
Fourth, as de jure voluntary programs, incentives play a
vital role in affecting the motivations operators have to par-
ticipate. The market determines the kinds of incentives a
participant in a program can expect to receive. These range
from reputation benefits with key stakeholders and custom-
ers to economic incentives such as higher prices, customer
loyalty, or market access. Fair trade is distinct in requiring
higher prices to be paid to participating farmers; yet, there
is still uncertainty about these benefits, given that certified
farmers often cannot sell all their production to fair trade
buyers.[2] Participation can also improve efficiency and/or
productivity, improving the profit margin of an operator
even if prices remain unchanged. Most initiatives also
include an on-product label as a mechanism to differentiate
compliant from noncompliant products; some initiatives,
however, seek to be “pre-competitive” (i.e., establish stan-
dards for practice that companies will not seek to shirk in
efforts to profit relative to competitors) within an industry
and hence avoid including a product label given its potential
to spur rather than lessen incentives for competitive be-
havior (for instance, the Common Code for the Coffee
Community, see Auld[24]). Arguably, such initiatives are a
closer fit with Prakash and Potoski’s[27] green club concep-
tualization as these initiatives can create environmental and
social benefits while offering participants excludable, non-
rival reputation benefits (for further discussion of this point,
see Auld[24]).
Although the private and/or non-state characteristics of
these governance arrangements have received considerable
attention, it has long been understood that the state affects
the operation of these private governors in many important
ways (see Cashore[6]; compared with Foley[22]; Lister[28]).
Moreover, their standards deal with and seek to regulate
public or collective good issues, which also means they
can be characterized as public regulators.[29]
THE RISE AND EVOLUTION OF CERTIFICATION
What explains the rise of these initiatives? And why have
they evolved to become important governance actors in
Certification as Governance
various economic sectors? Four categories of factors have
received attention in work seeking to explain the rise, and
sometimes the evolution, of certification initiatives.
The first category of factors comprises government
actions. At the international level, research has linked the
development of certification to the unwillingness and
inability of states to cooperate internationally to regulate
many social and environmental problems. Failure of the
International Tropical Timber Organization to support a
labeling program for sustainably managed tropical timber,
for instance; or the ensuing failure to agree to a binding
global forest convention at the U.N. Convention on
Environment and Development in 1992. These stalled
efforts have been linked to the subsequent initiation of
the FSC.[30,31] In addition, the global trade regime, and
particularly the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT)’s requirements to treat like products the same
(Article III) and its general exceptions for health and safety
considerations (Article XX)[32] and the provisions of the
Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement on non-product-
related production and processing methods, have compli-
cated the efforts of governments that have sought to
undertake unilateral action to address some of the problems
certification arose to address. Bartley,[33] for instance,
explains how the Austrian parliament voted in 1992 for a
ban on tropical timber imports unless they were labeled as
sustainably produced; however, following pressure from
Malaysia and Indonesia claiming that the law ran counter
to GATT restrictions, Austria chose to use the funds allo-
cated for the law to support the emerging FSC.
At the national level, perceptions of public policies and
public policy processes are an additional factor that has
shaped the rise of certification. Sustained controversy and
discontent with the efforts of government to address contro-
versies of forest practices in the Canadian province of Brit-
ish Columbia were an early rationale for why companies
and environmental groups saw certification as an alterna-
tive.[19] Food safety crises in Europe, such as outbreaks of
bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), engendered
consumer concerns that helped motivate the launch of
EUREP GAP (now Global GAP), which began by setting
standards for agricultural production practices with a focus
on food safety and quality.[34] Concerns among cooperative
coffee farmers in Mexico that they had limited access to
international markets due to government control over quota
export licenses spurred interest in the initiation of the Dutch
Max Havelaar label in the late 1980s, which subsequently
became a member of the Fairtrade International (FLO,
formerly Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International)
when it formed in 1997.[24]
Public policy has also played an important role in deter-
mining which operators can participate in private certifica-
tion programs; in this way, these policies can influence the
development and spread of certification uptake. Operators
in jurisdictions with few performance rules or rules that
are unenforced will have to go further to meet the standards
3
of private certification programs.[35] As an example,
Bartley[36] discusses how tenure arrangements in Indonesia
worked against the ability of operators to obtain certifica-
tion either because the land’s status was ambiguous or
because the state actively worked to prioritize short-term
timber production over the long-term management ap-
proach required by certification. Similarly, public policy
(through grants, tax exemptions, and funding) shapes par-
ticipation in private rules more indirectly via university pro-
grams offering technical and scientific knowledge and
managerial training relevant to a sector or via support ser-
vices such as agricultural extension programs.[37,38] As
well, how public policy affects the organization of domestic
interest groups can influence how easily these interests can
participate and shape global private rulemaking. Examining
global product standards set within the International Orga-
nization for Standardization (ISO) and International Elec-
trotechnical Commission and financial reporting rules set
within the International Accounting Standards Board,
Büthe and Mattli[5] show that those industries that are hier-
archically organized to develop national standards have had
more success in having their interests represented and
embodied in global standards (see also, Cashore et al.[19]).
Market conditions constitute a second set of factors. At
the macro level, the changing nature of global capitalism
marked by shifts such as the rise of neoliberal norms and
institutions[33,39] and the rise and growing power of transna-
tional corporations in buyer-driven, global supply chains[34]
are seen as critical to understanding the origins of certi-
fication. With the former, Bartley[33] argues that one rea-
son why certification institutions emerged independently
around the same time to deal with the problems of forest
management and labor conditions in factories was their
respective fit with neoliberal ideas. But, although in for-
estry, the idea of certification has gained a good amount
of traction (not withstanding some critical groups), in labor,
the idea of certification has not been as welcome a solution.
Bartley,[36] in reference to Indonesia, notes: “The lack of
enthusiasm for certification among domestic activists is
not entirely surprising, since trade unions, NGOs, and
anti-sweatshop activists have often portrayed certification
systems as corporate dominated, weak in enforcement,
and disempowering (p. 22).” The growing prevalence of
large, transnational corporations has had effects too. With
few exceptions, brand and retail companies have played a
role in forming certification programs (e.g., Unilever has
helped establish the MSC, the Round Table on Responsible
Soy, and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), and their
commitments (often driven by pressure from environmental
groups, see Auld and Cashore,[40] Bartley,[41] and Gul-
brandsen[42]) have been central in driving the uptake of cer-
tification across sectors. At the same time, the push toward
large volumes and greater market uptake has created contro-
versy for its negative effects on the quality of certification’s
claims and the distributional consequences for smaller oper-
ators,[43,44] an effect discussed more below.
4 Certification as Governance
A third factor is the agents founding certification pro-
grams. Their interests, ideas, and capabilities help us under-
stand not only where and when certification forms, but also
what specific form programs take and what policy problems
programs seek to address. For instance, the Rainforest Alli-
ance formed in 1987 as an organization interested in devel-
oping alternative, incentive-based mechanisms to address
tropical deforestation, when compared with the boycott
approach popular at the time.[45,46] This vision of the prob-
lem facing forests has informed the work of the Rainforest
Alliance (and other programs, such as the FSC); the early
emphasis of the program’s standards, which began in
bananas and has since expanded to coffee, tea, cocoa, ferns
and cut flowers, fruits, palm oil, and cattle, focused on the
environmental impacts of the production of these commod-
ities for tropical forests. Other early programs, such as the
Max Havelaar fairtrade program in the Netherlands (and
other national labeling programs that followed, eventually
to coordinate as Fairtrade International), were more focused
on social development and economic terms of trade; these
goals largely reflected the interests and concerns of this
organization’s founders, groups such as Solidaridad in the
Netherlands and Oxfam in the United Kingdom. One can
also see the imprint of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
on many certification programs; it was an integral player
in the formation of the FSC, and it has since taken this
model to fisheries—with the MSC (established in 1997)
and more recently the Aquaculture Stewardship Council
(established in 2012)—and to tropical crops, such as palm
oil,[47] soy,[48] and cotton.[49]
Finally, one cannot understand the rise and evolution
of certification without understanding the internal opera-
tion of individual programs and how programs interact
over time. These processes matter in particular because
no focal institution exists as a default, or a generally re-
cognized, institution that ought to set standards for a
given global problem. Hence, unlike non-market private
standards setters (e.g., the ISO for technical standards)
that are recognized as focal institutions,[5] certification pro-
grams face the threat of competitive entry as they seek to
become recognized rule makers on a given social or en-
vironmental issue. Because of this, the creation of market
demand by an early program creates opportunities for
other programs to enter and possibly serve as competitors
or complements to the standards set by the first-mover pro-
gram. A recent analysis demonstrates that new programs
form as complements or competitors depending on the pol-
icy focus of the first mover and the opportunities for voice
that a program provides for a broad range of stakeholders.
More open and inclusive programs lessen the possibility
of entry, and a narrow policy focus facilitates the entry of
complements, whereas a broad policy focus fosters the
emergence of competitors.[24] Other research demonstrates
the role stringent standards (i.e., the degree to which
the standards leave operators little flexibility in how to com-
ply with the rules) play in motivating the emergence of
competitor programs, particularly the ones developed by
the industry.[19]
Taken together, these factors have been situated in sup-
ply and demand models for the rise of private governance,
where problems with, or gaps in, public governance
(domestically or internationally) are used to justify and
help motivate demand for private governance interventions.
What actors then serve as entrepreneurs to supply private
governance hinges on market conditions (e.g., a buyer-
driven supply chain) and the organization of interests (com-
panies, environmental groups, and funders) that will have
the capacity and credibility to step forward to lead the
development of a certification program (see, Green[1]).
The models of others go beyond the supply–demand dis-
tinctions,[50,51] and, as the final factor above demonstrated,
the internal evolution of first-mover programs[24] and the
diffusion of the certification idea more broadly also now
shape the rise and development of a growing field of trans-
national private governance.[52,20]
THE CONSEQUENCE OF CERTIFICATION
What do we know about the effects of certification? It is
useful to distinguish three dimensions of effects: space,
problem or issue area, and time. With each of these dimen-
sions, one can also consider spillover effects and interac-
tions. What follows uses these distinctions to explore the
consequences of certification.
The spatial dimension concerns where benefits accrue on
local, regional, and global landscapes and ocean areas when
dealing with fisheries. Does certification affect just the
behavior of the operator, farmer, or producer who partici-
pates, or are their spillover effects (positive or negative)
that affect a larger spatial scale, such as landscapes or sur-
rounding communities or farms? Work on examining the
operation-level effects shows that practices of certified
operations have improved. Early case study work on fair
trade certification, for instance, found marginal increases
in the income of farmers alongside complementary benefits
such as better access to preharvest financing and more
extensive investments in their homes and children’s
education.[53–55] Studies in forestry assessing the changes
audits required of certified operators have also documented
improved practices that affect environmental and social out-
comes (e.g., Newsom and Hewitt[56]; for a review, see
Cashore and Auld[57]).
Looking beyond the operational unit, spillover effects
have also been identified. For instance, Jaffee[55] documents
that high labor demands of organic coffee production
techniques altered the local labor market in the Mexican
coffee-growing communities he examined; this worked to
increase employment opportunities for other community
members (cf. Utting-Chamorro[54]; Mutersbaugh[58]). In
this respect, there were positive spillovers beyond the ben-
efits accrued by the participating farmers. Nicaraguan
Certification as Governance
producer organizations participating in fair trade also pro-
moted improved coffee quality, investing in cupping labo-
ratory facilities and entering and winning international
“cup of excellence” competitions.[54] A survey conducted
by the Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA),
by contrast, found limited indications of clear community-
wide effects of certification,[59] and Utting-Chamorro[54]
cautioned that farmers were often unsure how fair trade’s
social premium was being spent in their community.
In addition, a major concern for certification, which fol-
lows from its de jure voluntary quality, is the spatial con-
sequences of self-selection (i.e., those operators who face
the least cost of becoming certified are more likely to par-
ticipate). Considerable research looking at the adoption
of certification in several sectors (forestry, coffee, tea,
cocoa, etc…) documents that certified production is skewed
toward more developed countries.[2] There are certain pro-
grams that have been more successful in addressing this
problem (for example, Fairtrade International when com-
pared with other programs certifying coffee, see Auld[37];
or the FSC compared with the Program for the Endorsement
of Forest Certification, see Auld et al.[60]); yet, the broad
pattern remains a concern from the perspective of whether
certification can and will advance environmental and social
benefits at larger spatial scales.
The second dimension is the issue area or problem
space. Again, there are those changes that may improve
the practices that affect one particular problem, but then
have either positive or negative effects on other problems.
The central concern here is that certification programs often
develop standards that focus on a narrow but interrelated set
of concerns, and that, in doing so, they face both policy and
problem-interactive effects.[61] Policy-interactive effects
are defined as instances where the policy interventions of
a given certification program interact with other policy
interventions of other certification programs to have either
positive or negative effects. For example, the FSC initially
set a rule that required certified products comprise 100%
certified content. This rule meant recycled paper could not
carry the label, creating the possible perception that paper
from certified forests was environmentally preferable to
paper made from 100% post-consumer-recycled fiber.[61]
Or, remaining with forestry, increasing standards for forest
management practices may create more problems by unin-
tentionally growing the market share of substitute construc-
tion materials such as concrete and steel. Problem-
interactive effects, by contrast, capture instances where
the problems two or more certifiers are seeking to address
are coupled through social, economic, or ecological pro-
cesses. Hence, action by one program to address one prob-
lem, may affect the actions of other certification programs
on other, coupled problems. For instance, the problems of
land degradation at the landscape scale are hard for individ-
ual programs that focus on agricultural crops or natural
resources to address; the rules of programs that deal with
crops such as palm oil and soy set for whether and how
5
the conversion of forests for farming can occur will have
consequences for the problems of forest loss and degrada-
tion that concern programs such as the FSC.
A second important effect of this dimension occurs
where multiple certification programs exist to address the
same issue or problem area. Here, two broad patterns
have been identified. On the one hand, there have been
cases where competition for acceptance in the market
coupled with benchmarking has led to general upward
pressure on the standards of programs originally backed
by the industry in the forest sector.[62,63] On the other,
competing standards can create downward pressure, as
some have documented in comparing agricultural
standards.[2,64,65,66]
A final effect of the issue or problem area dimension
concerns interactions with public policy, which can range
from positive to negative. For instance, certification can
improve adherence to public rules, even those that are on
the books but are voluntary or not enforced.[66] Operating
in the opposite direction, institutional interactions have
also been examined for their unintended and negative
effects as they can serve to reduce rather than increase pres-
sure for better performance in a sector. Both forest certifica-
tion and fisheries certification have been charged with
legitimizing natural resource extraction over conservation
or protection[24]; similar concerns have surfaced about the
certification of fair-trade tea in India given negative impli-
cations for labor practices.[67]
The third dimension is time; that is, how do the effects
of certification evolve over time? One can consider both
of the earlier-discussed dimensions through this lens, which
various scholars have done to unpack whether there are
different pathways certification might follow, some that
could lead to more transformative effects and others to
more marginal effects.[68] In addition, there are also evident
spillover effects. For instance, in 1999, the FSC released
a revised Principle 9 that had been developed to address
the assessment of forests with important conservation val-
ues. What emerged was the idea of high conservation value
forests (HCVFs). Subsequent work by certifiers and other
organizations developed and refined a methodology for
assessing six high conservation values a forest might con-
tain [69]; and this method is now used both in the assessment
for FSC audits and also as a standard for assessing HCVFs
more broadly. Indeed, Asia Pulp and Paper—an Indonesian
company—is using this assessment method as part of its
2013 Forest Conservation Policy commitment; it has com-
mitted to not sourcing wood for its pulp and paper mills
that come from concession areas that have been identified
as having HCVF status.[70] On a more pessimistic note,
certain analyses see certification as a mechanism that
transforms the ideas of appropriate solutions to societal
problems,[39] ultimately reinforcing a norm-complex Bern-
stein[71]terms liberal environmentalism where markets are
seen as the right mechanism for remedying environmental
problems.
6 Certification as Governance
IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Certification has solidified its role as a governance mecha-
nism in the last two decades. Many measures can be offered
to capture this institutionalized presence. Certified pro-
duction accounts for double-digit market shares in several
sectors. Major retail and brand companies (e.g., Mars In-
ternational, Unilever, and McDonalds) have integrated
sustainable sourcing commitments into the core of their
business strategies. Certain governments, international
donors, and private foundations have invested and continue
to invest in the development and operation of certification
initiatives across a range of sectors. Membership in the
International Social and Environmental Accreditation and
Labeling (ISEAL) Alliance—a group formed by early lead-
ers in the certification space—has (as of June 2014) 15 full
members (programs in compliance with applicable ISEAL
codes) and six associated members (programs on their
way to compliance with ISEAL codes).
Still, there are many uncertainties ahead. The impacts of
certification remain under scrutiny. Current thinking sug-
gests that without a clearer basis of evidence that certifica-
tion is delivering environmental, social, and economic
benefits, sustained interest in the initiatives will be challeng-
ing and unwise. These ideas in part underlie the motivation
for the work of the ISEAL Alliance on impacts and monitor-
ing and evaluation, and for the work of COSA that seeks to
develop a common set of indicators for measuring the farm
and landscape effects of voluntary sustainability standards.
Evidence from such processes is still some ways off, and
even if the results are definitive either way, certification
as a governance mechanism has already left a lasting legacy
through such governance innovations as methods for
assessing the high conservation value of forests. Tracing
the consequences of such legacies, particularly through
their effects on government policy and policy processes
and business practice, is sure to be an area of continued
research attention for some time.
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