Adapting Standards: The Case of Environmental Management Systems in Australia

Private standards and certification schemes provide an increasingly significant site of study for scholars interested in the restructuring of the agri-food sector. In the last ten years there has been a burgeoning literature on standards and certification schemes, focusing particularly on organic (Guthman, 2004), fair trade (Renard, 2005) and retailer-led schemes (Campbell et al., 2006; Hatanaka et al., 2005). The rise of private standards schemes has tended to be conceptualized as part of a broader global shift from public to private forms of governance as large international supermarket chains in particular, and to a lesser extent actors such as civil society organizations and social activists, exert increasing control over agri-food supply chains (Burch and Lawrence, 2007; Fulponi, 2006; Henson and Reardon, 2005) including the production practices of processors and producer-farmers (Hendrickson and James, 2005). This relates to the more general influence of what Cashore (2002, p. 504) terms ‘Non-State Market-Driven’ forms of governance that ‘derive their policy-making authority not from the state, but from the manipulation of global markets and attention to customer preferences’.