By Morten Brodde, FSC Denmark
The feasibility of FSC’ standards and the involvement of stakeholders in making them were the main subjects at two side meetings during the FSC General Assembly. Changes have already been implemented and more are underway to make FSC more relevant and attractive.
“Streamlining”, “outcome orientation” and “risk-based approaches” are buzzwords not only in FSC but also in other certification schemes working to be more feasible for companies. On Monday mornings’ side meeting on new policy and standards solutions in FSC, attendees were introduced to FSC’s recent work to walk the talk.
Changing the mother document
Dorothee Jung-Wilhelm, System Performance Program Manager, FSC International was the first on the floor:
“Streamlining the normative framework is one of the core goals of FSC’s global strategy and outcome-orientation and risk-based approaches are two quite key components within that.”
To streamline FSC’s standards and other normative documents, the “mother document” of many FSC standards and policies - procedure FSC-PRO-01-001 needs to be improved and innovated and this is in its final phase. A final draft of the procedure that outlines in process steps how FSC documents shall be developed and revised will be submitted to the FSC Board of directors for decision making in November. According to Dorothee Jung-Wilhelm the revised procedure includes the two key components of streamlining:
“We have a certification standard scheme, where risk is already an element and risk-based approaches are part of our system. We have expanded this approach and looked at it again to see how we can innovate our system. Outcome-orientation is an element that we have also now embedded in the standard setting procedure for international normative documents”.
What is outcome-orientation about?
At the moment, FSC does not have any requirements or rules regarding outcome-orientation. But this will soon change, as FSC is revising the procedures that guide how forest stewardship standards are developed, where new rules on outcome-orientation are included.
But what does outcome-orientation mean from a forest standard perspective?
Outcome-orientation is when standard developers focus on the most relevant outcomes in a country and areas where impact is needed. Taruna, Program Manager at FSC International, explained the concept in this way:
“With the concept of outcome orientation standard developers will have to focus on some of the key areas, where they want to have an impact in their country. For some countries it will be increasing environmental benefits, however for other countries it will be increasing benefits or having more empowerment for the local communities, traditional people, and Indigenous People.”
Want to know more?
You can find more information about the revision of FSC’s procedure for standard-setting (FSC-PRO-01-001) at https://connect.fsc.org/current-processes/revision-fsc-pro-01-001-development-and-revision-fsc-normative-documents.