Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how the growing necessity of quantitatively measuring and evaluating the impacts of sustainability standards affects the way standards are designed and implemented. It also affects how standards developers conceptualize sustainability and how they imagine sustainable futures.

Paper long abstract:

People who work to develop, implement, and promote ("market") sustainability standards in global agro-commodity supply chains face pressure to show not only that the products they claim are certified are actually complying with their standards, but that certification generates positive social, environmental, and/or economic impacts. They respond to this pressure by obsessively measuring, evaluating, and reporting these impacts, accounting for everything from gender equality to cultural heritage, and pushing the logic of audit culture to its limits. Based on more than 50 interviews with people working to develop and implement standards for sustainable tea production in organizations like the Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade International, I show how the focus on demonstrating quantifiable impacts changes the way standards are designed (e.g., the inclusion of new data collection and disclosure protocols in popular sustainability standards), how they are implemented, how certification is achieved (e.g., how the relationship between farmers and auditors changes, as well as what gets audited and when), and how sustainability is conceptualized (e.g., what gets included and what gets ignored in definitions of sustainability and related impact evaluation methods). The paper also shows how quantitatively accounting for impact changes the way the future of sustainability is imagined, pushing standardizers to embrace invasive surveillance technologies like drones and satellites in order to collect and disclose social and environmental data, all in the name of transparency, accountability, and, ultimately, sustainability.