The side meeting ‘Exploring new ways for engaging the membership and streamlining FSC’s standard setting process’ focused on FSC’s standard setting process and how to improve membership engagement in the processes.
The meeting started with an interview with Stew Begg from Essity UK Ltd, Stew spoke about the throw-away comment “death by consultation”, that he made a few years ago at an FSC event. It was in a time when he was experiencing a cascade of requests for information, amendments of standards, membership comments or new consultations almost every week:
“I work in a company. FSC is not the only thing that we have to deal with, there are other certification schemes, where I get the same requests. The level of details that comes with consultations is incredible.”
Focused engagement and high-level consultation
FSC is aware of the challenges that members and stakeholders face in consultations and other processes of engagement. Dorothee Jung-Wilhelm, System Performance Program Manager, FSC International shared some of the changes in the revised standard-setting procedure for international normative documents that among others seeks to create new ways of engaging FSC’s membership.
A proposed change is to have more focused engagement:
“We are thinking about at which stage in the process it is most effective to consult and engage with members and how we can make the information accessible”, explained Dorothee Jung-Wilhelm
Instead of forming a working group as the first thing in a revision process followed by consultations through the platform like FSC do now, the revised standard-setting procedure proposes a different approach for engaging with members:
“We propose to start with a research phase or what we call a conceptual phase where we develop the high-level ideas and consult them with the membership and with stakeholders early on. So even before the scope of a revision process is determined we are reaching out to members, asking for input and only after this process would the working group be set up and the usual process followed.”
With focused engagement and consultations FSC will not only do the traditional public consultations but also contact those who are interested in participating in a process, and thereby not necessarily bombard everybody with everything.
Want to know more?
You can find more information about the revision of FSC’s procedure for standard-setting (FSC-PRO-01-001) here.