ISEAL Codes of Good Practice

Each code addresses a distinct failure mode of a standards system, and reading them as a set makes the logic visible. In broad scope terms, the standard-setting code concerns how requirements are developed: who is consulted, how stakeholders participate, how decisions are documented and reviewed. The assurance code concerns how conformity is checked: the competence and impartiality of those doing the checking, and the rigour of the process. The impacts code concerns whether the scheme measures what it is actually achieving and uses what it learns.

Standard-setting

Guards against requirements written by whoever has most at stake. A standard developed without genuine stakeholder participation tends to encode the interests of whoever drafted it.

Assurance

Guards against compromised verification. Requirements are only as good as the checking behind them, and an auditor paid by the audited has an obvious structural problem.

Impacts

Guards against schemes that never test their own theory. A scheme can run flawlessly and achieve nothing, and without measurement nobody would know.

ISEAL operates membership levels, and its full membership involves independent evaluation of a scheme against the codes. That evaluation is about the scheme’s systems — how it writes standards, how it assures them, whether it measures its effects. It is not an assessment of whether the scheme’s requirements are stringent, whether its subject matter is well chosen, or whether its outcomes are good.

The distinction is easy to lose and important to keep. A scheme evaluated against the codes has demonstrated that it is built and run according to recognised good practice. Two schemes both meeting the codes may set requirements of very different ambition, and the codes do not adjudicate between them. Procedural credibility is a real and necessary thing, and it is not the same as substantive stringency.

The proliferation of sustainability labels created a genuine problem: buyers and consumers face many seals, cannot evaluate any of them, and have no basis for telling a rigorous scheme from a marketing device. Anyone can write a standard, certify against it, and print a seal. In a field where the claims are about things no one can verify by inspection — how a farm treats its workers, whether forest was cleared — the incentive to make cheap assurances is considerable.

The codes are one answer: not a ranking of schemes and not a regulator, but a public account of what credible practice involves, against which schemes can be evaluated and by which they can be compared on process. It is a partial answer, because it addresses how schemes work rather than what they demand. But the alternative — evaluating each of hundreds of schemes on its merits, from outside, with no shared criteria — is not available to anyone.