Dr Alex Nicholls (Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship) examines how over the past ten years the market for Fair Trade products has grown at double digit rates across many countries in the North. As a consequence, Fair Trade is today the most significant example of a social enterprise entering mainstream markets. Furthermore, the Fair Trade model has had an influence beyond its own particular markets by playing an important role both specifically in establishing the 'ethical consumer' as...

Professor Timothy Sinclair (University of Warwick) looks at why getting credit ratings 'right' seems vitally important to many professional observers and politicians. The increasingly volatile nature of markets in a post-Bretton Woods world of international capital mobility has created a crisis in relations between the rating agencies and governments, which seek to monitor the performance of the agencies and stimulate 'reform' in their procedures and business models, even if the exact purpose...

Increased attention to sweatshops, child labour, and the suppression of labour rights has led to a range of voluntary initiatives that set, monitor, and certify labour standards in global supply chains. These include factory certification efforts like Social Accountability International, monitoring programs like the Ethical Trading Initiative and Fair Labour Association, and numerous corporate codes of conduct and supplier standards. Whereas supporters initially claimed that such initiatives...

Professor Ian Taylor (University of St. Andrews) discusses conflict diamonds and the governance of resources. Part of the Michaelmas Term Seminar series 2010. The rise of the 'conflict diamonds' issue in international politics, spurred on in the main by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), compelled the diamond industry to go on the offensive to convince the diamond-buying public that diamonds are 'clean' and legitimate. Stemming from this, the Kimberley Process has sought to manage and...

Professor Dan Klooster (University of Redlands) summarizes the formation and growth of forest certification and illustrates how it qualifies sustainability and leverages meaningful changes in forest management. Consumer demand seems to have played little direct role in the growth of forest certification. Instead, environmental campaigns and corporate interests in protecting brands drove the adoption of certification among buyers of forest products. Forest certification puts the responsibility...

Dr Clive Barnett (Open University) asks how do consumers know when they are acting responsibly? Are they making a difference when they buy "Fairtrade" or "certified organic"? Can consumers trust these kinds of accreditations? This presentation will focus on developing a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between the range of activities used by campaign organisations to enrol support and the ways in which ordinary people attribute meaning to the multiple demands placed on...

Michaelmas Term Seminar Series 2010 - Dr Lars Gulbrandsen, 'Introduction to and Overview of Third Party Certification'. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/