Towards more stringent sustainability standards? Trends in the cut flower industry

Sustainability initiatives have proliferated in many industries in recent years. This has led to an increasing number of standards that exist in parallel seeking to address more or less the same social and environmental issues. In this paper I explore whether parallelism has spurred a race to the bottom in flower standards seeking to regulate social conditions in the production of cut flowers aimed at the European Union market. The analysis suggests that while less stringent standards still dominate, so-called higher bar standards are gaining importance, as is the active inclusion of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and trade unions in monitoring standard compliance – a practice which potentially could allow standards to address more locally embedded and hidden problems like for example discrimination or lack of freedom of association. Nevertheless, less stringent standards still predominate and although an ongoing multi-stakeholder harmonisation initiative has real potential to ‘scale up’ more stringent standards, so far it has mainly benefited developed – not developing – country growers and workers.