Sensing Reality? New Monitoring Technologies for Global Sustainability Standards

In the 1990s, civil society organizations partnered with business to ‘green’ global supply chains by setting up formal sustainability standard-setting organizations (SSOs) in sectors like organic food, fair trade, forestry and fisheries. While SSOs have withstood the long-standing allegations that they are unnecessary, costly, non-democratic and trade-distorting, they must now respond to a new challenge arising from recent developments in technology. Conceived in the pre-Internet era, SSOs are discovering that verification systems that utilize annual, expert-led, low-tech field audits are under pressure from new information and communication technologies that collect, aggregate, interpret and display open-source ‘Big Data’ in almost real time. Drawing on the concept of governmentality and interviews with experts in sustainability certification and natural capital accounting, the paper argues that while these technological developments offer many positive opportunities, they also enable competing alternatives to the prevailing ‘truth’ or governing rationality about what is happening ‘on the ground’, which is of critical existential importance to SSOs as guarantors of trust in claims about sustainable production. While SSOs are not helpless in the face of the challenge, the paper concludes that they will need to take more than incremental action, and actively respond to the disintermediation challenge from new virtual monitoring technologies in order to remain relevant in the coming decade. Introduction In the 1990s, a new institutional form of environmental governance emerged in the shape of sustainability standard organizations (SSOs). Pioneered by the organic, fair trade and sustainable forestry movements, these first-generation SSOs developed multi-stakeholder standards to which interested companies could voluntarily certify themselves. Certification typically involves a thirdparty audit by a qualified and accredited certification body, which assesses compliance with the standard, identifies corrective actions to rectify non-conformities, and issues certificates of compliance once satisfied that these have been met. On obtaining certification, companies can apply to utilize the standard’s logo on products to signal to consumers that they have been ‘responsibly’ or ‘sustainably’ produced. Academic interest in these new, private environmental governance arrangements has been widespread, with scholars analyzing how individual systems operate, their institutional form, and their legitimacy, effectiveness and transparency (e.g. see Meidinger et al 2002; Cashore et al 2004; Bartley 2007; Tollefson et al 2008; Auld and Gulbrandsen 2010; Gupta 2010; Gale and Haward 2011). As SSOs became established and began to exert market influence, competitor schemes emerged in some sectors and new schemes in others. The forest industry evolved a competitor scheme to that launched by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in 1993, establishing the umbrella Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) in 1999 to unite the large number of national forest certification schemes that had emerged in the intervening years. Meanwhile, increasing controversy over the production of commodities like palm oil, soy, biofuels and farmed fish saw secondgeneration schemes emerge in the 2000s, including the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the 4C Association for coffee and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC). Globally, standardcompliant commodity production grew by 41% in 2012, far exceeding corresponding conventional