Designing for Value: Structuring Voluntary Certificate Programs to Increase Producer Participation and Stakeholder Credibility

Abstract

Commodity agricultural production in tropical forest regions is expanding rapidly and is frequently linked to deforestation, increased emissions of greenhouse gases, biodiversity loss, poor working conditions and wages, and land tenure conflicts. Voluntary certification programs are one type of intervention used to incentivize the agricultural commodity sector to improve sustainability, by incentivizing supply-chain actors to produce and source products according to agreed standards. We used field interviews to consider how the additionality of these programs might be maximized. We identify two dimensions of additionality: 1) increased participation by producers and 2) greater rigor of sustainability standards. We use the cases of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) voluntary certification program, with a focus on Indonesia, and the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) voluntary certification program for cattle, with a focus on Brazil to examine the role of program design choices in influencing sustainability outcomes. Design choices include standards setting, adoption, implementation, and monitoring and enforcement. We find that design choices by certification program developers tend to strengthen one of the two dimensions of additionality, increased participation or increased rigor, at the expense of the other. We recommend that design choices should aim to increase the value of participation for producers without sacrificing the rigor of the standard, for example by setting intermediary milestones for program participants without compromising the ultimate ambition of meaningfully enhanced sustainability.