Certification

In the past 30 years, a number of certification schemes have been developed in response to the environmental and social challenges posed by expanding industrial agriculture and natural resource extraction. Well-known examples include the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Roundtable on Sustainable Soy (RTSS), Bonsucro (in relation to sugar), and the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI). In the absence of adequate state regulation of corporate activities in (or outside) their jurisdiction, these often multistakeholder, mostly voluntary initiatives have played a key role in deciding what standards businesses in the natural resources and agricultural sectors should live up to, and if, and how, they should be held accountable to those standards.

With market solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises being pushed in global multilateral negotiations in the recent years – with notable support from the private sector – schemes that certify the generation of carbon and biodiversity credits have also been established or gained increased attention. 

Why is it relevant to indigenous peoples and forest peoples? 

The lack of sufficient governmental regulation in responsible production and supply chain management led to the development of third-party certification schemes like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Efforts have been made to include indigenous and forest peoples in governance and standard-setting, such as the FSC revising its standard in 2015 to respect these communities’ legal and customary rights and establishing a Permanent Indigenous Peoples' Council.

Commodity certification schemes have often provided an important – sometimes the only – advocacy space for indigenous peoples, forest peoples, and local communities, where they can seek to defend their human rights or seek remedy for violations, especially where access to legal recourse is unavailable or ineffective. However, challenges persist in the effectiveness of these schemes in stopping corporate environmental and human rights impacts, and especially in their ability to deliver meaningful remedies for violations, and to transform systemically unsustainable business models. Despite standards themselves in several cases incorporating key international human rights standards and playing an important role in mainstreaming human rights law concepts such as free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), significant gaps exist in implementation. Such gaps include the following: ineffective and insufficiently independent auditing and assurance processes, weak or no accountability mechanisms, as well as other loopholes, connected for example to how the rules apply to corporate groups, or the ability of corporations to escape accountability by leaving a scheme when a complaint is made or inadequately resolved.