Image credit: Toby Smith/CCI
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can play a vital role in ensuring that sustainability standards are informed by best practice and continual improvement. NGOs also play a key role in their development and implementation, contributing specialist sector knowledge, bringing perspectives on multi-stakeholder initiatives being rooted in principles of deliberative democracy and granting legitimacy in place of governments. However, there are many barriers to engagement in standards, particularly from environmental and development NGOs.
There are over 400 sustainability standards in current use or development, and engagement requires significant investment of resources. Some standards are therefore not as strong as they could be from environmental, social and governance (ESG) perspectives. At best this represents a missed opportunity for NGOs to maximise benefits from a key stage of industry development. At worst it risks allowing below-par standards to define business as usual for the foreseeable future.
The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is collaborating with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) on an exciting project to strengthen sustainability certification. This pilot project will seek to build and test a platform to support and enable NGOs to engage more effectively with standard development, implementation, and monitoring. It aims to ensure that standard setting bodies are continuously improving the level of rigour and performance required to be certified leading to better managed and more sustainable operations.
Check back soon for updated information on this project. This work is being supported through CCI’s Collaborative Fund for Conservation, which is funded by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
Samir Whitaker | 13 Aug 2018 | London, UK.
