The draft International Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility has gradually been taking shape over the past five years. ISO is a private nongovernmental body, headquartered in Geneva. And it is also the world’s largest developer of international standards.

The final plenary of the working group in Copenhagen yesterday marked a major milestone: agreement on a revised final draft of the guidance standard. That means that the development of the standard now moves on to the final stages of the process. The next step is to hand a revised draft to ISO’s members (standards bodies from more than 160 countries) for a two-month voting period. There can be no more than 25% of the total ISO member voting body voting ‘no’ if the standard is to be adopted and published as an international guidance standard late in 2010.

It was good news all round in Copenhagen as more than 400 delegates from over 80 countries (dubbed ‘experts’ rather than ‘representatives’ in ISO parlance) agreed on a final draft of the international guidance standard.

This post isn’t about all the good things that were agreed: the agreement of the Chinese delegation to text that everyone could live with; the resolution of concerns from participants from Gulf and Arab states about the use of the term ‘sexual orientation’ (resolved in favour of the term ‘personal relationships’); or how the 1500 outstanding comments and 15 ‘Copenhagen Key Topics’ were satisfactorily resolved.

Instead, this post is about how the private standards-setting process of ISO 26000 has triggered heated debates, and lasting concerns, on the content of the so-called ‘precautionary approach’ and how it should be applied by organisations other than governments. And those debates and concerns raise some basic questions about how ISO’s private processes bump up against public policy and the international legal commitments of states. That, in turn, raises a whole host of issues about the state of global governance and the confused state of distinctions between ‘private’ and ‘public’ global governance.

There are two basic problems.

First, a number of government representatives came to the ISO 26000 negotiating process with worries about how the potential trade impacts of the standard could interact with their obligations under the World Trade Organization. For example, the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade requires WTO Members to use relevant international standards as a basis for national technical regulations. A technical regulation that is based on a relevant international standard and created to address a legitimate objective benefits from a ‘rebuttable presumption’ that it does not create an unnecessary obstacle to trade.

Second, some government participants have the additional concern that their position in these talks could potentially have an impact on their international legal obligations more widely, or that working group participants are effectively re-interpreting delicately balanced intergovernmental agreements. Non-governmental participants do not have to confront these issues.

In the final plenary session in Copenhagen yesterday, three participants from the so-called ‘government stakeholder group’; those participating on behalf of the governments of the United States, India and Canada; expressed their concerns with two references to the ‘precautionary approach’ in parts of the proposed new standard that set principles for organisations to apply in pursuit of social responsibility in the fields of environment and consumer issues respectively.

The positions of these three experts at the talks can in many respects be seen as an inevitable consequence of the current unjoined up link between ISO and public policy. They mean bringing the political positions of governments to a voluntary and private standard where, in contrast to intergovernmental or national policy processes, they are less likely to be negotiable. This in turn causes frustration on the part of many participants who are committed to the ISO principle of ‘consensus’ decision-making across experts, regardless of how representative they might be, or how accountable to others.

The draft social responsibility standard does not apply to governments in their capacity as policy-makers. But it addresses other kinds of ‘organisations’ of all sizes, wherever they might be found.

Yesterday, in a concluding plenary session of more than 400 participants from more than 80 countries, a representative of the US government made it clear that the US government has ‘sustained opposition’ to a key part of the 100-page text which asks organisations of all sizes to take a ‘precautionary approach’. Canada and India also expressed their concerns about the text. The three have differing views on the content of the precautionary approach and how it should be applied, at the level of principle, to organisations.

Whilst it is beyond the scope of this post to explain in any detail the precise sources of the different positions, a brief explanatory diversion is probably useful.

The precautionary approach has been developed in a series of international agreements since the 1990s. As an approach, it proposes that lack of full scientific certainty in the face of risks of serious or irreversible damage or harm to the environment or human health should not be an excuse for postponing cost-effect preventive measures. The precautionary approach has also been adapted for application by other kinds of organisations, including businesses

The idea of a ‘precautionary approach’ is a central part of international talks on the global issue of climate change; controversial in part because of the global distribution of costs and benefits of tackling climate change in line with precaution. Now, the precautionary approach has properly been included in the global guidance standard on social responsibility because it reflects the reality of good social responsibility practice in many organisations.

The concerns of the three governments whose policy positions might reasonably be assumed to lie behind the representations of the three experts are not critical to progress with the standard at this stage since voting is ultimately based on votes from standards bodies.

Governments take part in the standard-setting process along with other groups including consumers, trade unions, and non-governmental organisations in so-called ‘stakeholder groups’. However, their objections to the text are an indication of a potential mismatch between a) political positions that arise out of government policy on issues such as climate change, science-based policy, or the management of risks from genetically modified organisms in the Capitals of the three countries and b) the reality of good social responsibility practice in markets and economic sectors around the world.

As ISO’s involvement in key issues of public policy action such as human rights, environment and labour (all addressed in the draft standard) gets deeper and broader, the tensions will only get worse unless governments themselves find a way to deal with the wider implications of ISO under the WTO and in international law.

Holding back progress in the world’s largest and most inclusive social responsibility negotiation, as these and other government positions risked (but did not eventually end) doing, is not the right way forward to ensure progress with social responsibility around the world. ISO 26000 shows that not all stakeholders can properly be treated as ‘equal’ in a process that takes effect through markets, not government ratification, and that is built around the principle of consensus.

One part of the way forward should be for both ISO and governments to clarify how governments might be ‘different’ to other stakeholder representatives in future ISO talks with public policy reach.

The ISO 26000 process has internally been relatively ‘democratic’ as a hermetically sealed process; but it is one with an impact on other ‘democratic processes’ that are not yet reflexively recognised within the ISO process.

The second part of the way forward needs to be for governments to go to the WTO to find ways to reduce the impact of ISO on their ‘policy space’ at national and international levels.

The third, and potentially trickiest area for action is to find a way to ensure that, where appropriate or necessary, government participants are freed up to be able to participate genuinely as ‘experts’.

For those whose governments see them truly as representatives of governments, (irrespective of the  fiction that they participate as ‘individual experts’), there are real concerns that their positions and views in such talks potentially has an impact, through evolving international law, on the content of their governments’ international obligations as states. ISO 26000 cannot be treated as a process that is subject to the Chatham House Rule, as ISO itself would like, because for some participants the positions taken have implications for public policy and hence accountability of governments; a key element of democracy itself. 

We must hope that in the meantime ISO 26000 is adopted by ISO members over the summer, and that it begins to generate its promised positive impacts on the social responsibility practices of organisations and their contribution to sustainable development around the world.  

The challenges of achieving democracy in relations between governments are well known.

In the United Nations, voting generally proceeds on the basis of ‘one country one vote’, not ‘one citizen one vote’. There is no ‘world parliament of citizens’ to provide a global constituency for international decision-making.

The United Nations Security Council with its limited membership, has a casting vote on many crucially important issues.

Smaller countries, or those with lower average per capita incomes or trade and investment flows, often complain that they are left out of key international decisions, particularly where international trade liberalisation is concerned.

Too often countries pursue national economic self-interest, not an enlightened global ethic, when they decide on negotiating positions in international negotiations. Climate change negotiations have sadly been a case in point.

In short, there is lots to be done to equip current systems of intergovernmental negotiations and institutions both to reflect democracy and to deliver sustainable development.

Multistakeholder Democracy and sustainable development

Alongside these challenges, sustainable development is strongly associated with a recognition that complex and many-headed environmental and social challenges cannot be resolved by governments, or citizens, or businesses, acting alone. And it is not only states who participate in negotiating the global governance rules that shape sustainable development. Non-governmental organisations and businesses are also important players.

These players bring skills and insights that can enhance expertise and bring decision-making closer to affected interests. But their participation in international negotiations also raises issues of transparency, representation, legitimacy and accountability. 

Larger non-governmental organisations and businesses may be better resourced and potentially have more impact in some international negotiations than the representatives of smaller or less well-resourced countries.

A variety of international partnerships and  multistakeholder initiatives have therefore sprung up to address environmental and social challenges that cross national boundaries. At the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit for Sustainable Development, these kinds of initiatives were actively promoted as so-called ‘Type II partnerships’.

International multistakeholder initiatives raise major questions about the proper mix between ‘representative democracy’ on the one hand, and on the other hand decision-making on public issues in which other stakeholders play a direct role in shaping policy.

Standards, democracy and sustainable development

We aim to explore, analyse links between representative democracy and other kinds of multistakeholder decision-making at international level.

Our starting point for analysis is a process which aims to develop a new International Guidance Standard on the Social Responsibility of organisations of all kinds.

The “ISO 26000″ process involves hundreds of people from over 75 countries, organised as individual experts in a total of six stakeholder categories. These include industry, non-governmental organisations, governments, trade unions and consumers.

ISO 26000 process is important from a ‘democracy and sustainable development’ perspective, because it covers many public policy areas, including human rights, labour and environment, where governments have already negotiated international frameworks.

International standards, such as those of ISO, are also given special status in global governance by rules of the World Trade Organization. These set out circumstances when WTO Members must use relevant international standards as a basis for their national product laws and regulations.

The ISO 26000 process has unfolded through a working group of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). The working group has been working since 2005 to develop the draft standard, which will be formally released for an initial vote by ISO’s member standards bodies in September 2009.

You can read more about some of the tensions between government-led public policy and multistakeholder consensus-based decision-making in ISO 26000 in a May 2009 article by Halina Ward for Ethical Corporation here. 

In September 2009, Halina will be attending a small retreat meeting of practitioners and non-governmental organisations in New York State. The meeting will consider the role of market-based social and environmental standards in addressing global sustainability challenges. The retreat is being convened by the Pacific Institute and ISEAL Alliance. 

For us, the meeting is an opportunity to reflect on the role that environmental and social standards play in shaping the relationship between democracy and sustainable development.

Halina Ward analyses tensions between government-led public policy and multistakeholder decision-making in this piece on the proposed ISO 26000 International Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility.

Read the article on ethicalcorp.com