A compilation of submissions to the Workshop and Policy Dialogue organized under the auspices of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour and Inwent (Capacity Building International, Germany) in Berlin, Germany on 21-22 November 2005...

Over the last several decades, voluntary certification programs have become a key approach to promote sustainable supply chains for agricultural commodities. These programs provide premiums and other benefits to producers for adhering to environmental and labor practices established by the certifyin...

Certification from the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) has recently become the fundamental requirement of businesses seeking to ensure continuous quality improvement. However, further evaluation is needed to ascertain whether those ISO certified enterprises could enhance their ov...

Many major corporations and countries have made commitments to purchase or produce only "sustainable" palm oil, a commodity responsible for substantial tropical forest loss. Sustainability certification is the tool most used to fulfil these procurement policies, and around 20% of global palm oil pro...

ISO 14001 is an international standard for Environmental Management Systems, adopted by over 36,000 organizations worldwide. This paper attempts to determine the length of time after which a given company has implemented ISO 14001 experiences emission reduction. The sample used is a group of 264 man...

During recent decades, the impact of industrial organisations on the environment has become clearly evident. It has also become more difficult to hide and more expensive. Globally, this has caused many enterprises to put all their efforts into seeking management instruments that allow them to reduce...

An expanding body of research is defining drivers, benefits, and challenges of adopting ISO 50001 energy management systems. The Clean Energy Ministerial's Energy Management Leadership Awards program requires ISO 50001-certified organizations to develop case studies of their implementation experienc...

We analyse the impact of fair trade (FT) affiliation on monetary and non-monetary measures of well-being in a sample of Kenyan farmers. Our descriptive and econometric findings document significant differences in terms of varieties of products sold, price satisfaction, monthly household food consump...

The case studies and priorities outlined in this report will help steer the conversation on how to continue to align standards in order to reduce red tape and administrative burden for Canadian businesses and lead to healthier economic growth in a way that is sustainable and beneficial for Canadians...

Alternative trade organizations (ATOs) based on philosophies of social justice and/or environmental well-being are establishing new channels of trade and marketing. Partisans promote ATOs as systems to transfer benefits from consumers in the wealthy northern hemisphere to producers in the poor south...

The ISO 9001 standard for quality management has been implemented by more than 1,000,000 organizations worldwide. It has received a high degree of attention in existing literature. However, findings about the impact of ISO 9001 certification on financial performance are not consistent in the literat...

Fair Trade certification may have important social effects on small-scale producers but empirical evidence is limited. We conducted logistic regressions using data from a 2009 survey of Rwandan coffee farmers to estimate the link between Fair Trade and social capital—measured as farmer trust and par...

An increasing number of corporations around the world are certifying their environmental management systems by ISO 14000 series standards. Advocates of ISO 14001 claim substantial operational, managerial, and competitive benefits for corporations that adopt the international guidelines. Critics cont...

Agricultural commercialization can help to lift subsistence farmers out of poverty, but can also have adverse effects on gender equality. We explore whether private food standards – with their particular elements to regulate production and trade – could serve as a vehicle to promote gender equality ...

We evaluate the impact of Fair Trade (FT) affiliation on child schooling within a sample of Chilean honey producers with a retrospective panel data approach. From a theoretical point of view, we argue that FT should have a positive effect on child schooling since it generates a short-run pure income...

According to advocates, eco-certification is a win–win solution to the problem of environmental degradation caused bydeveloping country agriculture, improving both the environmental and the economic performance of farmers. However, these notionalbenefits can be undercut by the tendency of relatively w...

Export banana production in Latin America is pesticide intensive, receiving much negative publicity regarding human health problems and environmental degradation. The Rainforest Alliance (RA) certification scheme was established to certify farms that met a number of social, occupation health and env...

Total quality management is from a decade an important and useful organizational system for increasing companies' competitiveness, by optimizing processes with a particular focus on the customer. Among all the methodologies, ISO 9000 certification is one of the most common and recognized approaches ...

Worker welfare and employment conditions in the agri-food-producing and processing sectors in the global south have become an increasing concern for consumers. Sustainability standards, such as Fairtrade, play an important role in agri-food markets of horticultural produce and may be a tool to addre...

We assess whether the implementation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification scheme in the Congo basin has had positive additional impacts-as compared to existing regulatory frameworks applied in noncertified Forest Management Units (FMU)-on (1) the working and living conditions of log...