The use of social standards in value chain management is the most common approach to socially responsible business in international trade between the South and the North. Some of these standards focus on core labour and human rights issues (e.g. ETI, SA8000); others are beginning to tackle wider issues such as terms of trading and criteria for smallholders.

Experience in implementing these initiatives has highlighted the importance of multi-stakeholder engagement in both improving and verifying company performance. This is a key lesson from ETI, and is at the heart of AA1000, a foundation standard for improving the quality of social responsibility strategies.

The developmental impact of these initiatives is unclear, and in many instances a primary objective is to maintain corporate reputation/brand equity rather than secure positive developmental outcomes. However, this is not always the case. ETI has a developing country focus and seeks to contribute to DFID goals. There are also company/industry initiatives such as the Sustainable Cocoa Initiative that stem from concern over production and supply rather than reputation. While it is probably too early to identify significant impact from such initiatives, continued support, particularly from international development agencies, will partly depend on the identification of meaningful indicators for the future.

Three complementary issues that have been highlighted by ETI pilots, research by the Natural Resources and Ethical Trade programme and discussions with DFID are:

• it is not sufficient to have ‘ethical producers’; there must be supportive relations within and beyond the value chain involving a range of stakeholders;
• stakeholders need to develop the capacity to fulfil new roles in order to cement value chain partnerships and embed ethical value chain management in their core activities; and
• some stakeholders require indicators for measuring the developmental impact of initiatives to justify continued support of value chain management as a development approach.

• Develop a model for understanding the impact non-producer stakeholders have on producers’ ability to comply with different social standards.
• Identify and cost the capacity-building needs of stakeholders to implement a multi-stakeholder partnership approach to ethical value chain management.

• Identify provisional indicators for measuring the contribution of different approaches used in ethical supply chain management to international development goals.