Ethical Certifications: Can We Really Trust Them?

• Published date: 20 August 2020
• Subject Matter: Corporate/Commercial Law, Environment, Consumer Protection, Government, Public Sector, Corporate and Company Law, Environmental Law, Consumer Law, Human Rights, Climate Change
• Law Firm: Leigh Day
• Author: Sophie Turner

During the 1970s and 1980s, growing consumer awareness of the power held by multinational corporations and the abuses taking place throughout the supply chains of products consumed in the Global North led to the development of a wider civil society movement supporting fair and ethical trade. This movement culminated in the emergence of a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives ("MSIs") in the 1990s: schemes aimed at certifying products as ethical, sustainable, or fair. One of their key objectives was to hold corporates to account for practices throughout their supply chains.

Two of the most prominent certifications in this country are issued by the Fairtrade Foundation and the Rainforest Alliance. Both organisations purport to help improve conditions at the bottom of multinational supply chains. Fairtrade's mission is described as "better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world". The Rainforest Alliance, in turn, claims to work on issues "from fighting deforestation and climate change to building economic opportunities and better working conditions for rural people". Both organisations claim to ensure that conditions at source meet minimum standards and, in turn, certify produce with their logo for sale on the global market.

Such certifications give consumers a degree of comfort that they can buy products with a clear conscience. More recently, however, criticism of such ethical certification schemes has been growing. Can we really trust them?

What are the problems?

A fundamental criticism of so-called ethical certifications and the MSIs that underpin them is that there is a lack of real evidence that the schemes really work. Indeed, the world of certifications appears to be marked by a lack of rigorous, methodological research, making it difficult critically to analyse whether, and to what degree, the schemes impact on the lives of those they are said to assist. An excellent recent report by the Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity at Harvard Law School is a welcome addition to this otherwise limited field.

The report does not make for happy reading. It presents the culmination of ten years of research into MSIs and their effectiveness, and analyses a number of different certification schemes, including, for example, Bonsucro, Fairtrade International, Rainforest Alliance, and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative.

In summary, it finds that such...