Impacts Code Newsletter – February 2009

This is the first of what will be monthly updates on the ISEAL Impacts Code development process. If you want to receive these updates via email, please sign-up to the mailing list in the sidebar.

Paddy Doherty
Credibility Tools Manager, ISEAL Alliance

Overview

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to develop a Code of Good Practice for Measuring the Impact of Social and Environmental Standard Systems (the Impacts Code). The process (for developing the Impacts Code) follows the ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards; especially concerning stakeholder involvement and managing the consultation process.

Impacts Code Committees

The process to develop the Impacts Code began in September 2008 when ISEAL announced its intention to develop the Code; and called for nominations to the steering and two technical committees (Issues Committee & Methodologies Committee – see below).

Stakeholder Mapping

While the Impacts Code committees were being assembled, the stakeholder mapping process was being undertaken. This involves identifying any persons who might have an interest in the Impacts Code and creating a little database that shows their organisational interest (NGO, CB, Gov., industry and others) and the region of the world where they are located. The process is inexact, but it does provide us with an idea of what types of interests are being represented, and where they are located. Then (throughout the process) we can work to ensure there are more persons involved from the less represented groups and regions. As would be expected, the list is heavily weighted towards Europe and North America. Organisationally, the list is more evenly balanced between government, ISEAL members, researchers, other standards bodies, industry, donors, and consultants. There is an obvious lack of the voice of the producer and the consumer (though it is often pointed out that we are all consumers). Stakeholder mapping will continue throughout the Impacts Code project.

Research

Concurrent with the development of the committees and stakeholder mapping ISEAL commissioned Aimee Russillo to research the state of the art in impact measurement within standards systems. Aimee’s two reports “R082 ISEAL Key Impact Issues WHAT” and “R083 ISEAL Methodology HOW” are now available of the ISEAL impacts webpage.

What we’ve learned

Now that we have had an in-person meeting of all the committees (Steering Committee Dec 8 2008, Technical Committees Jan 27, 28 2009) we are getting an idea of stakeholders expectations, and how we might be able to meet those expectations within the Impacts Code. Here are some of the more salient observations:

• traditional impact assessment is not a useful model for standard systems, which are ongoing intereventions that change over time—therefore we are focusing on measuring our contribution to long-term impact;
• impact assessment must be integrated into an overall monitoring and evaluation system within a standard system;
• we need to develop common language and metrics for impact assessment;
• clarity on the goals of the standard systems is the necessary first step towards developing an ‘impact pathway’ model for impact assessment;
• the impact pathway will illustrate the causal chain of assumptions that lead from inputs to activities to outputs to outcomes, and finally towards our contribution to impact;

Stakeholders have provided us with some notions of what they want to see in the actual document:

• The Impacts Code should be affordable to implement;
• We need to explain the concepts in the code in very clear language;
• The code should be a prescriptive as possible but no more detail than needed;
• The code should include some guidance on the data management process.