Voluntary Sustainability Standards: Illusions of Progress and a Way Forward

Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) are an integral part of facilitating green consumerism, green economy and growth. However, many of these standards are now at a crossroads. Against this background, the book examines the illusions and realities of VSS in recent decades and whether these standards can be made fit for a vital future.

Ulrich Hoffmann, a German economist, was a senior lecturer and had a chair on trade and international financial relations at the Institute on Economics for Developing Countries in Berlin before joining the UN secretariat in the mid-1980s. Most of the time, he worked for the secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Environment (UNCTAD) in Geneva, focusing on production and trade of commodities, issues of sustainable resource management and the transformation of agriculture as well as on the economics of climate change. For many years, he was principal editor of UNCTAD’s regular Trade and Environment Review, one of UNTAD’s flagship publications. After retiring from UNCTAD in 2015 he was a senior associate at the Research Institute on Organic Agriculture (FiBL) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

Arpit Bhutani has a Master of International Law and Economics from the World Trade Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland. He worked at United Nations, Geneva as part of the team that prepared and launched the UN Forum on Sustainability Standards (UNFSS). He is also an expert on the circular economy, having worked with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. He is a TEDx speaker and a Huffington Post contributor. Arpit is a serial entrepreneur, handles his 70-year old food processing family business in India, Hind Agro Sales, and now is also co-founder of two circular economy startups in Copenhagen, Circular Innovation Lab and ShopC.