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Tripartite Standards Regime

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Tripartite Standards
Regime
ALLISON LOCONTO, JOHN V. STONE
AND LAWRENCE BUSCH
Standards are exemplary measures against
which people and things are judged. They
can be informal, resembling norms and hab-
its; they can also be formal, resembling laws
or written codes of conduct or embedded in
material objects. Both formal and informal
standards are involved in nearly every aspect
of human life. However, we will use the term
“standards” to refer exclusively to “formal
standards” which are those that are primar-
ily invoked in global governance. In order for
formal standards to create and keep the order-
ing that is intended by their use, a number of
elements employed: (i) processes for certifying
compliance to the standards, (ii) processes for
accrediting the certifiers who audit the stand-
ards, and (iii) relatively clear sanctions for vio-
lation of these standards. Generally referred
to as “conformity assessment,” these processes
traverse and integrate the public and private
sectors domestically and internationally. As
such, formal standards are part of a “tripartite
standards regime” (TSR), which is a regime of
governance that consists of standards-setting,
accreditation, and certification (Loconto &
Busch 2010). These three processes involved
in constructing a TSR emerged pragmatically
at different times and in different geographic
spaces beginning in the late nineteenth century.
Today, a TSR is utilized in the global econ-
omy as a way to order a number of processes
involved in cross-border trade. In this capacity
there are a set of organizations that are often
involved but little discussed in the mainte-
nance of global trade. These include standards
development organizations (SDOs) such as the
International Organization for Standardization
(ISO) and the International Electrotechnical
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer.
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
1
Commission (IEC), thousands of large and
small certifying bodies (CBs) such as the
Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS) and
Det Norske Veritas (DNV), as well as accredi-
tation bodies (ABs) such as the International
Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC)
and the International Accreditation Forum
(IAF). Together these organizations are
involved in development of diverse types of
standards, the certification of persons, firms,
and objects to those standards, and the accred-
itation of certifiers and SDOs that regulate
global trade in a number of different ways.
BACKGROUND
Metrology is indeed the “backbone of stand-
ards” (Hessenbruch 2003) and the history of
standardizing weights and measures is the
history of many organizations involved in the
TSR. For example, in the standards develop-
ment process, metrology (and other techno-
scientific norms) is used to create standards,
which in turn are then sold on the market and
form a significant portion of an SDO’s revenue.
However, standards also consist of reference
materials (well-defined materials for calibrat-
ing instruments, and printed materials such
as handbooks and manuals), laws and formal
regulations, and conventions. For example,
nutritional standards involve the use of fully-
characterized food product samples as well as
manuals that explain how to compare a given
batch with the sample to determine equivalence.
The history of standards development is
the story of the maintenance of measures and
standards for transferring technology, mainte-
nance of consumer confidence, and facilitation
of international trade. For example, in the late
nineteenth century, technical committees of
engineers set a precedent by meeting to create
standardized measures to ease the transfer of
the new technologies of the century – electrical
2
power, telecommunications, and mechanized
production of products with interchange-
able parts (for example the Ford model T).
This collaboration was facilitated by the 1875
Metric Treaty and set the stage for the emer-
gence of numerous SDOs on the national and
international scene. The early SDOs, which
consisted of “interested parties” such as engi-
neers and industrialists, were often driven by
domestic needs for consistency in metrology
and standards for industrial and war goods.
The history of the British Standards Institute
(BSI) highlights the use of standardization as
a vital mechanism for transferring technolo-
gies and economic development throughout
the British Empire. Following the develop-
ment of national standards bureaus (BSI was
the first created in 1901, numbers rose rapidly
in the interwar period and have been steadily
rising ever since; today, nearly every nation
has one), there was a focus on standardizing
military technologies, which were found to
be nonstandard, and thus incompatible, dur-
ing World War I. Concurrently alongside this
development of SDOs was the emergence of
hundreds, and now thousands, of CBs in the
private sector, which began mainly in the ship-
ping and agricultural sectors as safety inspec-
tion services. With the institutionalization of
SDOs, CBs took on more auditing responsi-
bilities and marketed their services as means to
verify compliance with standards.
During the twentieth century, consumer
product standards became increasingly impor-
tant due to changes in industrial production
and the emergence of numerous consumer
goods of dubious quality available in the mar-
ket. Part of the philosophy underlying the New
Deal in the United States was a shift in empha-
sis from production to consumption. However,
with a culture of consumption came the prob-
lem of selection of goods in the market, when
consumers faced both opportunities and chal-
lenges to their ability to distinguish goods
based on quality attributes that went beyond
price considerations; thus emerged the need
for industrial and consumer standards, and
ways to audit their compliance, particularly
following World War II. More recently, there
has been a specific focus on the use of stand-
ards in the development and maintenance of
international trade. Here they are used for
technical compatibility, consumer protection
(such as food safety standards) and as a means
to minimize technical barriers to trade. This
focus on international trade was reinforced
with the introduction of international trade
agreements. For example, the Technical
Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement attempts to
enhance trade by blocking the use of standards
as technical barriers, while the Sanitary and
Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement does the same
with respect to standards for human, animal,
and plant health. Together they have enhanced
the need for standards and specifically for
accreditation (and thus the TSR) within the
framework of facilitating international trade in
the current global economy. Both are part of
the overall framework of the World Trade
Organization.
STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT
ORGANIZATIONS (SDOS)
The last century has been marked by shifts
from a regulation to a coordination role for
SDOs; from a technical/scientific approach
to a business approach in their management;
from a focus on national and regional stand-
ards to international standardization; and from
intergovernmental and other official organiza-
tions to private forums and consortia of stand-
ardization. In recent years, formal standards
designed by firms or committees have prolif-
erated. Standards are developed and managed
by both specialized and generic SDOs, at both
national and international levels. Specialized
SDOs are those that develop standards for a
specific sector or process (for example the IEC,
see below). Generic SDOs cover a wide range
of standards and are exemplified by the ISO.
SDOs are responsible for creating, updating
and maintaining technical and scientific stand-
ards for the standardization of any number of
people, processes and products.

The International Electrotechnical
Commission (IEC)
The IEC prepares and publishes international
standards for all electrical, electronic and related
technologies, collectively known as “electro-
technology.” Established in 1906 in London,
the IEC was the first international technical
committee to take on the status of a perma-
nent body whose purpose was to develop and
harmonize technical standards. At its incep-
tion, the IEC focused on the harmonization of
vocabulary, units, quantities and symbols. It is
from this work that a common understanding
was reached of what constitutes a volt and the
names and dimensions of units of measure-
ment, which varied not only from country to
country, but even within each country prior
to the standardizing work of the IEC. In 1948,
the IEC central office moved from London to
Geneva, Switzerland, where UN agencies and
the ISO were also being established. The IEC
has most recently created new technical com-
mittees for fuel cell technologies, for methods
to assess human exposure to electric, magnetic
and electromagnetic fields, and for avion-
ics. In 2005, the Commission published the
most recent edition of the IEC Multilingual
Dictionary, which now contains 19 400 electro-
technical definitions in French and English and
equivalent terms in 13 languages.
IEC members are known as National
Committees and these represent a nation’s elec-
trotechnical interests in IEC management and
standardization work. These interests include:
manufacturers, providers, distributors and
vendors; consumers and users; all levels of gov-
ernmental agencies; professional societies and
trade associations; and standards developers.
The constitution of the National Committees
is determined at the national level and repre-
sents combinations of public and private sector
actors. The IEC’s organizational model is one
centered on technical committees (made up of
representatives of the National Committees)
on which the interests of the various coun-
tries and functional groups are claimed to be
balanced. However, much like the societies
3
within which this organization exists, these
committees favor those interests with suffi-
cient resources and ability to provide volun-
teers who can participate in the committees
(Higgins & Hallström 2009). IEC remains
important today, as its organizational model
has established the modus operandi for legiti-
mate standards organizations: “one based on a
plurality of interests represented.”
The International Organization for
Standardization
In 1946 the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) was created from the
union of two organizations: the International
Federation of the National Standardizing
Associations established in New York in 1926
and administered from Switzerland, and
the United Nations Standards Coordinating
Committee, established in 1944 and admin-
istered in London. The main purpose of the
original organizations, and thus also of ISO,
was to facilitate trade and technology transfer.
The member bodies are national SDOs, such
as BSI and the American National Standards
Institute (ANSI), on the basis of one member
per country. The ISO is a nongovernmen-
tal organization that claims to form a bridge
between the public and private sectors by virtue
of its member organizations. Some are part of
the governmental structure in their countries
or are government mandated. Others, however,
are purely private, having been established by
national partnerships of industry associations.
The ISO serves as an international body
that coordinates standards across nations, in
an attempt to “standardize the standards.” In
other words, its member organizations create
standards that are then adopted by the ISO
technical committees as international stand-
ards. ISO has developed over 18 000 interna-
tional standards on a variety of subjects; some
1100 new ISO standards are published every
year. The ISO portfolio is best known for the
ISO 9000 management series. However other
influential standards are: the ISO 14000 series
(environmental management systems), ISO
4
22000 (food security), ISO 31000 (risk man-
agement), ISO 28000 (supply chain security
management), and ISO/IEC 65 (conformity
assessment). ISO is also beginning to develop
standards for Corporate Responsibility (ISO
26000). Its work has been influential in the
spread of SDOs globally by linking many
national standards bodies to the international
standards process. For example, manage-
ment systems standards have bridged the gap
between metrology, product standards and the
social and ethical process standards that are
becoming increasingly common in the global
market. “Quality management” standards are
intended to improve all aspects of organiza-
tions’ processes, which should result in an
overall improvement in products. Thus, some
scholars note that effective incorporation of
process standards have pushed some firms
to change their overall business strategies
(Murphy & Yates 2009).
CERTIFICATION BODIES (CBS)
Certification refers to the issuing of written
assurance (the certificate) by a body attest-
ing that it has conducted an audit and verified
that the product, process or person conforms
to the requirements specified in the standard.
This audit is completed by a certifier. There are
three types of certifiers: first parties (sellers, for
example warranties); second parties (buyers,
such as where contracts require specific rules
for the use of licensed objects); but in most
instances in the global economy, certifications
are provided by third parties (ostensibly neu-
tral organizations that are not parties to the
exchange). Moreover, most (though not all)
of these certifications involve non-state actors
that serve as intermediaries between parties to
various economic and non-economic trans-
actions. Collectively, they involve a dual shift
of trust from highly personalized relations on
the one hand, and from state-mediated rela-
tions on the other, to trust in the validity of the
certification process (and by implication the
SDO and certifying agency) itself. Certifiers
use various forms of audit (such as inspection
of documents, tests of processes or products,
examination of practices and facilities in use)
to ensure the conformity of all sorts of people,
products, practices, and services to particular
sets of standards.
CBs are most often private organizations
(either NGOs or commercial firms); how-
ever, there are also instances of public sec-
tor organizations. CBs can range in size from
one to thousands of employees (SGS employs
59 000). Most CBs began in Europe and North
America, initially working only in these
regions. However, as the use of private stand-
ards spread globally, many CBs have expanded
their operations to most other nations. For
example, SGS was established in Switzerland
in 1878 with the original purpose of offering
agricultural inspection services to grain trad-
ers in Europe. During the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, the company diversified its services to
also offer inspection, testing and verification
services across a variety of sectors, including
industrial, minerals and oil, gas and chemicals,
among others. In 1981, the company went pub-
lic. The current structure of SGS, consisting of
10 business segments operating across 10 geo-
graphical regions, was formed in 2001. SGS
claims to be an industry leader, which has been
achieved through continual improvement and
innovation and through supporting customer
operations by reducing risk and improving
productivity.
From their narrow scope of offering inspec-
tion services in the late 1800s, today CBs are
flourishing businesses that offer, for a fee,
some combination of the following four ser-
vices: (i) standards development; (ii) veri-
fication that the standard is implemented;
(iii) certification and (iv) auditing to ensure
continued compliance. For example, DNV
is an independent foundation established in
Norway in 1864, with the original mission
to inspect and evaluate the technical condi-
tion of Norwegian merchant vessels. Today it
offers the following services: assessment, cer-
tification, classification, consulting, materials
and technology testing, software solutions and

support, technology qualification, training
and verification.
Another characteristic of CBs is that they
offer an array of accredited and unaccredited
certification services for a number of different
standards, rather than just one set of stand-
ards developed by one SDO. Moreover, many
of the CBs have become involved in develop-
ing their own certification packages where
one audit will certify to a several standards at
once. For example, DNV verifies sustainability
reporting to the DNV Verification Protocol
for Sustainability Reporting. The principles
and concepts of the protocol are aligned with
the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guide-
lines, the assurance standard AA1000AS and
sustainability reports based on other princi-
ples. Thus, certifiers have become an increas-
ingly important component of the TSR, as
noted by their growth in numbers and range
of geographic influence. Furthermore, CBs
have tended to expand the scope of their work,
becoming standards setters themselves.
ACCREDITATION BODIES (ABS)
Accreditation refers to the formal recogni-
tion by a specialized body – an accreditation
body – that a CB is competent to carry out
certification audits for specific standards
and that SDOs are competent to develop
standards. It is therefore an independent and
authoritative attestation to the competence
of a CB. The history of standards and certi-
fication show that there is significant vari-
ation with respect to the work of certifying
organizations and what is certified (Cochoy
2002). This diversity may be confusing, or
permit outright fraud, leading to the need for
accreditation. Thus, accreditation emerged
on the scene much later than SDOs and CBs
(mid- to late twentieth century) as a mecha-
nism to standardize and regulate certifica-
tion and to some extent the standards setters
as well.
ABs are most often government agencies,
but can also be NGOs, industry associations
5
or a combination of the three. There are two
main types of accreditation bodies: generic
and specialized. Generic ABs are multipur-
pose and are best illustrated by the national
accreditation bodies (NABs) and their inter-
national agglomerations or Accreditation
Associations (AAs) (e.g., the ILAC and
the IAF). Beginning as national laboratory
accreditation bodies, ABs first emerged in
Australia in 1947 as a means to ensure stand-
ard weaponry. General purpose national
accreditation bodies began to gain importance
in the 1970s in the global North and have
grown in the global South in the 1990s, often
with the help of “development assistance” by
the United Nations Industrial Development
Organization (UNIDO), the World Bank,
and bilateral donors. During the last part of
the twentieth century, accreditation spread
beyond the original mandate of laboratory
practices, namely to management systems
certification, product certification, personnel
certification, information security manage-
ment and environmental management. This
expansion allowed for the emergence during
the 1990s of specialized ABs focused on spe-
cific groups of standards, or on the accreditors
themselves. For example, within the agrifood
sector significant ABs are GLOBALGAP, the
British Retail Consortium (BRC), Fairtrade
Labelling Organizations International (FLO)
and the International Federation of Organic
Agriculture Movements (IFOAM).
International Laboratory Accreditation
Cooperation (ILAC)
The first ILAC Conference was held in
Copenhagen in 1977. This conference brought
together laboratory accreditation bodies and
other interested parties from around the world
to contribute their ideas and support for the
creation of the cooperation, whose specific
purpose was to help remove technical barriers
to trade. In 1996, ILAC became a formal coop-
eration with a charter to establish a network
of mutual recognition agreements (MRAs)
among accreditation bodies that would fulfill
6
this purpose. In 2000, 36 laboratory accredi-
tation bodies (full ILAC members) from 28
economies worldwide signed an arrange-
ment to promote the acceptance of technical
test and calibration data for exported goods.
ILAC’s tiered membership structure includes
laboratory and inspection accreditation bod-
ies that are recognized as offering accredita-
tion services in their national economies and
among other requirements comply or are in
the process of gaining compliance, with ISO/
IEC 17011. This membership represents more
than 70 economies and regional organizations.
For example, regional cooperation bodies are
found in Europe (European Cooperation for
Accreditation), Asia (Asia Pacific Laboratory
Accreditation Cooperation), Latin America
(InterAmerican Accreditation Cooperation),
Africa (Southern African Development
Community in Accreditation), and Central
Asia (Central Asian Cooperation on Metrology
Accreditation and Quality). Thus, ILAC is a
private cooperation between private and public
accreditation bodies.
The International Accreditation Forum (IAF)
Created in 2000, the IAF is the world associa-
tion of conformity assessment accreditation
bodies and other bodies interested in conform-
ity assessment in the fields of management sys-
tems, products, services, personnel and other
similar programs of conformity assessment.
IAF’s members consist of national accredi-
tation bodies, other organizations that con-
duct and administer programs by which they
accredit bodies for certification/registration of
quality systems, products, services, personnel,
environmental management systems of simi-
lar programs of conformity assessment, and
associations that represent a similar group of
entities internationally or within an economy
or region. IAF’s primary function is to develop
a single global program of conformity assess-
ment. The purpose of this program is to reduce
risk for businesses and customers by providing
assurance that accredited certificates can be
relied upon. In other words, the IAF accred-
its the accreditors. This is done first by ensur-
ing that IAF accreditation body members only
accredit those who are competent to do the
work they undertake and are not subject to
conflicts of interest; and second by establishing
Multilateral Recognition Agreements (MLAs)
between its accreditation body members
whereby members recognize the equivalence
of other members’ accreditations to their own.
Thus, IAF is also a private association that
includes private and public sector members.
The IAF is looking to create a system
whereby conformity assessment accredita-
tion conducted in one country is valid in all
other countries. This is also the ultimate aim
of the ILAC Arrangement, where they seek
to encourage the increased use and accept-
ance by industry and regulators of the results
from accredited laboratories and inspection
bodies, including results from laboratories in
other countries. These two organizations are
thus also working together on a global scale
to harmonize assessment requirements and
processes. They have declared that June 9th be
celebrated as World Accreditation Day, to help
raise awareness of the importance of accredita-
tion activities and the organizations’ objective
of “certified once – accepted everywhere.”
CONCLUSIONS: THE TRIPARTITE
STANDARDS REGIME PERFORMING
TRADE GOVERNANCE
The role of SDOs, CBs and ABs in the gov-
ernance of global trade was solidified with
the free trade agreements of the World Trade
Organization (WTO). The WTO reinforces
ISO, IAF and ILAC’s objectives to remove
trade barriers through the development and
use of international standards. This is most
evident in the case of the TBT Agreement,
which seeks to coordinate global trade and
facilitate market transactions. In 1979, the
Tokyo Round Standards Code was signed by
32 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade) Contracting Parties. This Code defined

the rules for preparation, adoption and appli-
cation of technical regulations, standards and
conformity assessment procedures. Negotiated
during the Uruguay Round, the updated TBT
Agreement (signed in 1994) has become inte-
gral to the WTO and has reinforced the use
and central role of standards and conform-
ity assessment in global trade. For example,
through the WTO dispute settlement mecha-
nism, which uses both the law and the market
to sanction firms and nations, what are often
voluntary standards have become de facto
mandatory standards for global trade. This
in turn has pressured all countries to develop
SDOs and ABs that can keep national econo-
mies competitive in global trade.
The interdependence of these three types of
organizations is fundamental to the function-
ing of a TSR, and as such the emerging system
of global governance of trade through the use
of standards. Notably, the TSR forms a system
of private governance that is based on existing
national and international laws (such as anti-
fraud, property, and contract law), but it is
also largely outside the conventional systems
of state-led governance. In other words, the
standards harmonization processes and the
IAF MLA/ILAC MRAs are negotiated within
the private sector. Thus, the TSR is illustrative
of the theory of neoliberal “governmentality”
(Foucault 2008). The policy promoted by neo-
liberal states is to level the international play-
ing field and to build competition regimes,
thus turning the state into an active promoter
of markets. However, through the process
of eliminating trade barriers (via the WTO
agreements) a new set of political edifices
based on the construction and maintenance
of “conformity assessment” have been erected
and empowered. It is here where the public-
private nature of the TSR becomes increas-
ingly important, as the use of conformity
assessment as part of supply chain strategies
by many of the businesses involved in global
trade decreases direct reliance on govern-
ment regulation and increases the importance
of mutual recognition of accreditation. Thus,
a governance regime emerges that is neither
7
completely within the state nor wholly out-
side of it, but fully integrated under a market
rationality.
SEE ALSO: Standardization; World Trade
Organization.
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FURTHER READING
Bingen, R.J. & Busch, L. (2006) Agricultural
Standards: The Shape of the Global Food and Fiber
System. Springer, Dordrecht.
Boli, J. & Thomas, G. (eds.) (1999) Constructing
World Culture: International Non-Governmental
Organizations Since 1875. Stanford University
Press, Stanford, CA.
Bonanno, A. & Constance, D. (1996) Caught in the
Net: The Global Tuna Industry, Environmentalism
and the State. University Press of Kansas,
Lawrence.
Brunsson, N. & Jacobsson, B. (eds.) (2000) A World
of Standards. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Genschel, P. & Werle, R. (1993) From national hier-
archies to international standardization: modal
changes in the governance of telecommunica-
tions. Journal of Public Policy 13 (3), 203–225.
Hallström, K.T. (2006) ISO enters the field of social
responsibility (SR): construction and tension of
8
global governance. In: Schuppert, F. (ed.) Global
Governance and the Role of Non-State Actors.
Nomos, Berlin.
Hatanaka, M. & Busch, L. (2008) Third-party certi-
fication in the global agrifood system: an objec-
tive or socially mediated governance mechanism?
Sociologia Ruralis 48 (1), 73–91.
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Higgins, W. & Hallström, K.T. (2007) Stand-
ardization, globalization and the rationalities of
government. Organization 14 (5), 685–704.
Marlin-Bennett, R. (1993) Food Fights :
International Regimes and the Politics of
Agricultural Trade Disputes. Gordon and Breach,
Langhorne, PA.