The relationship between voluntary sustainability standards (VSS), trade and sustainable development are among the most pronounced concepts sought-after the realm of green global value chains, says the 3rd Flagship Report of the United Nations Forum of Sustainability standards (UNFSS), released this month.
“UNFSS addresses the sustainable development value of voluntary sustainability standards by pooling resources, synchronizing efforts, and assuring policy coherence, coordination and collaboration among United Nations agencies”.The UNFSS is coordinated by a Steering Committee of five United Nations agencies: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); The International Trade Centre (ITC); The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment); The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).
VSS are now also being discussed as a key instrument to help multinational corporations and governments contribute towards achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and its 2030 targets (WWF, 2017). According to the UNFSS, voluntary sustainability standards is a catalyst of sustainable development”.The Report demonstrates how VSS can contribute to sustainable development and measures the impact by providing the empirical links between VSS and the SDGs. Benchmarking 10 selected SDGs against the requirements of the 122 VSS in the sample, the analysis reveals a signifcant potential to create institutional complementarities between VSS and the SDGs. In particular, in areas such as decent work (SDG 8), responsible production and consumption (SDG 12), and life on land (SDG 15), there are strong overlaps between the content of VSS and the SDG targets. However, the potential of VSS to deliver on these objectives remains uncertain and contested, – underscores the Report. The impact of VSS on trade is subject to much debate, particularly due to a limited uptake by the growing economies of India and China, which seek to preserve their competitive advantages based on the relaxed regulations related to labour, environment, taxation of the negative externalities.
The key questions of this report include: What are the impacts of VSS from the trade policy perspective? What sustainability concerns do VSS address? Do VSS have significant impact upon developing countries trade success and in their achievements of the SDGs? What can public actors do to support VSS’ contribution to trade opportunities? What can potentially be the stipulated roles of global governance?
Given the increasing increasing influence of VSS over export opportunities in recent years, the objective of this report is to provide an in-depth understanding of VSS from trade policy perspective and explore how trade can shape the influence of VSS on developing countries’ market access.
The Report is devided into two chapters. The first chapter analyzes the effects of VSS in the global economy by identifying the direct and indirect effects of VSS on sustainable development and trade, providing benchmarking analysis with reference to the 2030 SDG agenda, determining the indirect effects of VSS as either a market access enabler or barrier, that eventually ensues policy considerations in the effort to strengthen VSS through public governance.
The second chapter complements the first chapter with a focus on the National VSS Multi-Stakeholder approaches, which predominantly sees the evolution of VSS taking shape in developing countries, followed by the national platform establishment experiences and knowledge-sharing contributions provided by Brazil, China and India as pilots of this initiative.
