Publications

This shared approach represents an unique alignment on a common core set of simple indicators for measuring farm sustainability; they are based mostly on COSA indicators and were refined within a community of practice with leading standards organizations, agri-food companies, NGOs, and development agencies. While useful for impact evaluation, these indicators are proposed primarily for performance monitoring.

This content was created for a COSA Partner organization and some of it has limited access. For more on each report please contact the Partner director or [email protected]

The 2nd Flagship Report of UNFSS seeks to further dissect the interplay between VSS and public governance processes by striving to answer the following question: What are the optimal dynamics between public policy processes and voluntary sustainability standards to ensure sustainability objectives are most effectively met?

The State of Sustainability Initiatives Review 2014 provides a bird’s-eye view of market and performance trends across 16 of the most prevalent standards initiatives operating across ten different commodity sectors.

As part of COSA’s ongoing multi-lateral collaboration representatives from the Sustainable Food Lab, COSA, and the ISEAL Alliance came together to co-author Partnering for increased learning in smallholder supply chains.

Raluca Dragusanu and Nathan Nunn (Harvard University) and COSA President Daniele Giovannucci provide a critical overview of the economic theory behind Fair Trade.

To explore what we can do to increase the environmental results of these sustainability standards, COSA’s president Daniele Giovannucci joined Brian Milder and an esteemed group of researchers and scientists in compiling the “Agenda for assessing and improving conservation impacts of sustainability standards in tropical Agriculture”, recently published in the Conservation Biology journal.

Sustainability standards have seen rapid growth. Given their role in influencing land use, particularly in environments with great biodiversity and deforestation, much can be learned from efforts to evaluate and […]

As part of an ongoing global effort to document and understand optimal sustainability approaches, COSA collaborated with a Wageningen University-led initiative to create policy briefs for the Dutch Government.

The Sustainable Trade Initiative IDH is an initiative of the Dutch government, private companies, NGOs and trade unions to improve the economic, social and environmental sustainability of production systems in […]