26

Scaling up Sustainability – The Role of Voluntary

Standards

Businesses are increasingly embracing the sustain-
ability agenda and have moved the discussion from
philanthropy to competitiveness and value creation.
However, while sustainability has matured as a con-
cept, the goal that it seeks to promote – the long-term
reconciliation of social, environmental, and economic
demands – requires that more organizations (public
and private) become more deeply engaged in relevant
practices. In other words: we need scale, if we want to
achieve the transformative change that is necessary to
address some of the pressing problems surrounding
us. More than one billion people lack access to elec-
tricity, safe drinking water, and food; the gap between
the rich and the poor is widening, both within and
among countries; and some of the world’s ecosystems
are in steady decline.

In this commentary I argue that voluntary standards
(e.g., the Forest Stewardship Council and the Fair La-
bor Association) provide an opportunity to ‘scale up
sustainability’, particularly since transnational hard
law for social and environmental issues remains lim-
ited in various ways. By ‘scaling up’ I mean that more
companies become more deeply engaged in sustain-
able business practices. However, I also caution that,
while standards may help us to achieve more scale,
they are also facing numerous problems that poten-
tially impede their impact.

!e Rise of Sustainability Standards
I de!ne a standard in general as a rule for a common
purpose and voluntary use, decided by several indi-
viduals or organizations.1 In modern life, standards

–
riety of ways and are designed for di”erent purposes,
ranging from the size of paper to interface technolo-
gies for telecommunication devices. With rising con-
cerns about unsustainable business practices and the

By Professor Andreas Rasche, Center for Corporate
Social Responsibility, Department of Intercultural
Communication and Management

1For a more elaborate discussion of the role of standards in general, see Brunsson, N., Rasche, A, and Seidl, D. (2012). #e Dynam-
ics of Standardization: #ree Perspectives on Standards in Organization Studies. Organization Studies 33: 613-632.

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in
Society at the Centre for Corporate Social Re-
sponsibility (cbsCSR) at Copenhagen Business
School. He holds a PhD (Dr. rer. pol.) from Eu-
ropean Business School, Germany and a Habil-
itation (Dr. habil.) from Helmut-Schmidt-Uni-
versity, Hamburg. His research focuses on
corporate responsibility standards (particularly
the UN Global Compact), the political role of
corporations in transnational governance, and
the governance of global supply networks. He
regularly contributes to international journals
in his !eld of study and has lectured on cor-
porate social and environmental responsibility
at di”erent institutions in Europe. He co-edited
#e United Nations Global Compact: Achieve-
ments, Trends and Challenges (Cambridge
University Press). His latest book Building the
Responsible Enterprise (with Sandra Waddock)
was published in May 2012 by Stanford Univer-
sity Press. Andreas collaborated with the UN
Global Compact in the context of di”erent pro-
jects and currently serves on the Global Com-
pact LEAD Steering Committee. He joined Co-
penhagen Business School from the University
of Warwick in August 2012. More information
is available at: http://www.arasche.com.

Researchers’ corner

Research

27

inability of some governments to address social and
environmental problems, a variety of sustainability
standards have emerged in recent years. !ese stand-
ards represent so” law implying that corporations
commit to them voluntarily.2

I classify sustainability standards into four categories:
–

tainable corporate conduct (e.g., the UN Global Com-
pact), (2) standards that certify production facilities
against prede#ned criteria (e.g., Social Accountability
8000), (3) standards that outline indicators for sus-
tainability reporting (e.g., the Global Reporting Ini-
tiative), and (4) standards that de#ne processes and
key terms to enable the creation of management sys-
tems around sustainability issues (e.g., ISO 26000). Of
course, there is overlap between these categories (e.g.,
ISO 14001 de#nes management systems that can be
certi#ed).

Why Sustainability Standards Can Provide Scale
Why, then, can standards scale up sustainable busi-
ness practices? First, standards help #rms to trans-
late qualitative sustainability problems, which are
o”en based on disparate interpretations, into quanti-
#able indicators. Standards make sustainability issues
measurable and hence allow #rms to set up relevant
management systems. For instance, while water sus-
tainability can cover numerous dimensions and mean
di$erent things to di$erent #rms, the Global Report-
ing Initiative o$ers indicators to measure water with-
drawal, pollution, and recycling. !is translation of
qualitative information into common metrics enables
benchmarking and allows for performance measure-
ment. In other words, it moves sustainability from
concept to facts. Second, standards are swi”er to glo-
balize than hard law regulations. !e emergence of
hard law depends on the willingness of governments
to move forward. While some governments have tak-
en a proactive stance when it comes to regulating so-
cial and environmental issues, others are lagging be-
hind. Sustainability standards already a$ect regions
where legal regulation is either weak and/or not exist-
ing. For instance, the UN Global Compact has helped
to globalize the sustainability agenda by creating local
participant clusters in India and China. Of course,
even the Global Compact has a long way to go in these
economies, but given that both countries make up for
almost 40% of the world’s population, there is certain-
ly an opportunity for scale.

2 !e concept of so” law is much richer than to state that it is about non-binding obligations. For a detailed discussion, see Abbott,
K. W. and Snidal, D. (2000). Hard and So” Law in International Governance. International Organization 54: 421-456.

Finally, some standards enjoy high degrees of legiti-
macy, as they are based on multi-stakeholder govern-
ance processes, balancing voices from various actors
geographic domains. Initiatives that are perceived as
legitimate are likely to grow their participant base,
as the case of the Forest Stewardship Council shows.
Hence, we should expect that legitimate standards are
able to increase their impact on relevant problems
over time. Of course, this is not to deny the superior
regulatory authority and legitimacy of democratically
elected governments. It is to say, however, that once a
standard is perceived as legitimate by potential adop-
ters and the wider public, it becomes attractive to a
broader set of companies (largely because the latter
are interested in positive legitimacy spillover e$ects).

!e Limits of Voluntary Standards
While standards have proliferated, their potential to
scale up sustainability is also limited in a variety of
ways. One limit concerns the existence of too many
unconnected, and partly competing, initiatives. For
instance, there are multiple standards trying to en-
roll #rms in supporting fairtrade co$ee production.
!ere are also various initiatives for certifying fair la-
bor conditions in global supply chains. It is unclear
whether the market for sustainability will support this
multiplicity in the long run, particularly since sup-
pliers o”en have to obtain multiple certi#cations at
the same time. Practitioners have also criticized the
lack of interfaces between apparently complementary
standards, such as the Global Reporting Initiative and
the UN Global Compact.

Standards can also be challenged on the grounds that
they are not yet capturing the interaction e$ects be-
tween di$erent problem areas. While standards o$er
a wealth of indicators, these indicators usually remain
isolated and do not acknowledge interdependent ef-
fects between social and environmental challenges.
For instance, climate change has a profound e$ect on
water availability in many countries, which in turn

–
els. Making these links is not always easy, as causal-
ity chains are long and e$ects between variables not
yet well documented. However, ignoring these inter-
dependencies is equally dangerous, as it can lead to
a false security that problems are already adequately
addressed.

28

Another limitation relates to the lack of accountabil-
ity mechanisms when looking at selected standards.
Participants may select their level of compliance stra-
tegically when not being held accountable for their
actions, or, in some cases, may even completely de-
couple talk from action. For instance, the UN Global
Compact has been criticized for its weak accountabil-
ity processes making it hard to determine to what ex-
tent a participant adheres to its principles, while other
standards such as SA 8000 do not make certi!cation
reports publicly available and hence lack transparen-
cy. Weak accountability mechanisms can impede the
further uptake of standards, since commitment to
these initiatives depends on them being seen as legiti-
mate alternatives to other forms of regulating business
conduct.

!e Bottom Line
It may seem contestable to argue that voluntary stand-
ards can help to scale up sustainable business practic-
es. A”er all, voluntary solutions only reach a selected
number of !rms and, as a result, have to remain limit-
ed in terms of their overall impact. But we need to be
careful when selecting our point of reference for judg-

social and environmental issues is unlikely to emerge
in the near future making standards an attractive,
albeit imperfect, tool to enhance corporate sustaina-
bility. Especially when compared with other forms of
self-regulation (e.g., !rm-speci!c codes of conduct),
standards can level the playing !eld by encouraging
!rms to live up to a common set of rules. However,
the bottom line is that rules by themselves are not
enough; rules need to be embedded into the strategy,
structure, and culture of an organization in order to
unfold their full impact.