Sustainability initiatives have proliferated in many industries in recent years. This has led to an increasing number of standards that exist in parallel seeking to address more or less the same ...social and environmental issues. In this paper I explore whether parallelism has spurred a race to the bottom in flower standards seeking to regulate social conditions in the production of cut flowers aimed at the European Union market. The analysis suggests that while less stringent standards still dominate, so-called higher bar standards are gaining importance, as is the active inclusion of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and trade unions in monitoring standard compliance - a practice which potentially could allow standards to address more locally embedded and hidden problems like for example discrimination or lack of freedom of association. Nevertheless, less stringent standards still predominate and although an ongoing multi-stakeholder harmonisation initiative has real potential to 'scale up' more stringent standards, so far it has mainly benefited developed - not developing - country growers and workers.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, INZLJ, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
Load filters
No result was selected!
Please select the results that you wish to export.
The search was successfully saved.
Editing
The search could not be saved.
Saved searches can be viewed in the list My searches.
The changes made to the saved search were saved successfully.
Save search
Shelf entry
No result was selected!
Adding material to shelf was successful.
Adding material to shelf was partly successful.
Adding material to shelf failed completely.
It was not necessary to add the material to the shelf.
Please select the results that you want to put on shelf!
On shelf the following records have been successfully added:
On shelf the following records have been successfully added:
