TRANS SUSTAIN prouldy presents the stakeholder summary report from the research project's first phase, which analyzed the effectiveness of Voluntary Sustainability Standards.
The report summarizes the most important findings and gives policy recommendations for stakeholders. The full report can be dowloaded here, free of charge.
Policy Brief: Combining Sustainability Certifications to Improve Livelihoods: Lessons from Colombian Coffee Cooperatives
Increasingly, coffee farmers seek certification of multiple Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) in order to diversify their sales channels. However, due to the current oversupply of VSS-certified coffee it is unclear to what extent holding multiple certifications truly makes economic sense for smallholder farmers. Our study compared the economic outcomes of holding multiple private and industry-led VSS certifications, namely Nespresso AAA, Starbucks C.A.F.E. Practices, and 4C in addition to Fairtrade, for over 600 households across two coffee cooperatives in Colombia. We found that the addition of private and industry-led certifications makes mini-mal difference to smallholders’ economy, and thus do not offer a viable path out of poverty for coffee farmers. Accordingly, policymakers should promote initiatives that enhance economic and institutional support for smallholders’ cooperatives directly, and encourage the implemen-tation of other livelihood diversification strategies that help shield producers from the negative effects of environmental and economic shocks in the coffee sector.
Publication on the effectiveness of mainstreamed voluntary sustainability standards
The TRANS SUSTAIN team published its second article in the journal Regulation & Governance, titled “Mainstreamed voluntary sustainability standards and their effectiveness: Evidence from the Honduran coffee sector”. On the basis of over 600 farm-level observations in three regions of Honduras, we find that the stringency of rules – if they are known by farmers – and the level of farm‐gate prices are significantly correlated with farmers’ performance and lower levels of decoupling across a majority of indicators. These results speak to the importance of supporting small‐scale actors’ awareness of and financial capacity to comply with proposed sustainability rules.
Publication on the institutionalization of private governance
TRANS SUSTAIN’s Janina Grabs published her article “Assessing the institutionalization of private sustainability governance in a changing coffee sector” in the journal Regulation & Governance. The study finds that while norm generation around responsible supply chain management and the organizational institutionalization of standard-setting bodies is well advanced, the practice of internalizing social and environmental externalities through the routinized production and purchase of higher priced certified goods continues to be questioned by industry actors. Indeed, conditions that favored normative and organizational institutionalization, such as high levels of industry concentration, product differentiation, and deliberative interaction, are shown to represent barriers to the practice-oriented institutionalization of market-driven regulatory governance.
TRANS SUSTAIN research published in the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review
The TRANS SUSTAIN team is excited to announce that its paper “Understanding Coffee Certification Dynamics: A Spatial Analysis of Voluntary Sustainability Standard Proliferation”, which received the IFAMA Best Paper Award in the category “relevance to managers”, has been published in the peer-reviewed International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, Volume 19 Issue 3. Thanks to the open access status of IFAMR, the article is now available to be downloaded under this link.
The paper explores the spread of Voluntary Sustainability Standards in three leading coffee origins in Latin America (Costa Rica, Guatemala and Colombia) through the use of expert interviews, spatial mapping techniques and quantitative data analysis. It provides up-to-date information on the population of certified coffee farmers as well as identifying structural, geographical and socio-economic factors that impact their certification decisions. Furthermore, it describes the important role of supply chain actors in rolling out Voluntary Sustainability Standards and makes recommendations for ensuring the inclusivity of these schemes.
