Interview with Pierre Hauselmann

To what extent do you think quality issues have prevented the sector from being more environmentally friendly in recent years?

I don’t think that is the right question. Yes, aid quality and accountability have been of central concern in recent years while environmental aspects are only just beginning to be taken into consideration seriously. But I don’t think we can say that the first issue is preventing the other from being taken into account. The fundamental problem comes from our society as a whole which is used to neglecting the environment and prioritising more immediate considerations. And the aid sector is not unique in this respect. Whereas it should have been obvious that the environment is an integral part of aid quality, just like accountability, we have compartmentalised quality, accountability and the environment. As a result, the numerous direct and indirect references to the environment (at least ten) in the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS) have more or less gone unnoticed. Though these references exist, the CHS unfortunately focuses only on local environmental aspects and does not take into consideration that global aspects can have very local consequences – I’m thinking, particularly, of climate change, but not only. The current revision of the CHS is an opportunity to be more explicit and, above all, to address environmental issues from a more global perspective. At the same time, we shouldn’t try to make the CHS an environmental standard: that is not what it is for.

To what extent can standards help to make the sector more environmentally friendly? What are their limits and what are the alternatives?

Standards not only provide a framework in which mechanisms of all kinds can operate, but also allow the effectiveness of these mechanisms to be measured. From that point of view, a well-designed standard and an independent and rigorous system for evaluating compliance – which, together, form the standard system – can lead to significant improvement, as has been shown in numerous sectors. In the aid sector, this is becoming really obvious since the implementation of the CHS.

In all sectors where conditions vary, particularly those that involve human beings, the big question is how to get the right balance between flexibility and prescription. Otherwise, the standard system either becomes too lax or too prescriptive. In both cases, it loses its relevance and becomes a barrier.

There are two main families of standards: technical standards with very clear results-based demands, which are often quantitative; and system management standards which require the existence of processes that are supposed to guarantee the quality of an object or a process. This approach was developed in the 1950s for the automobile sector which was diversifying significantly at that time. The famous ISO 9000 standard ensures that processes exist to guarantee that products have a constant level of quality, but does not define what this quality should be. This approach is much more flexible than the other one, and theoretically it is more adapted to the aid sector, but it has the disadvantage of allowing almost any level of quality.

In the 1990s, new ‘ethical’ systems of standards appeared. These combined the two previous approaches: they defined a system and certain results that the system was supposed to achieve. The CHS inversed this approach: it defines the quality of the service that affected people are supposed to receive and gives indications about the kind of management system that can ensure that the level of quality remains constant. The CHS nevertheless fundamentally remains a system standard.

The reason for such a long introduction was to justify a simple answer: standards have an important role to play in making the system more environmentally friendly. To do this, they not only have to get the right balance between flexibility and dictates, but they also need to be combined with a rigorous and independent system for checking compliance, which allows mechanisms to be attached as incentives for putting them in place. The CHS provides this framework in an exemplary manner, and it is by far the best example that I have worked with in my professional career, despite the limits I mentioned before.

However, no matter how important they are to meet environmental challenges, standards are not a panacea. We therefore shouldn’t be talking about alternatives, but of complementary actions and mechanisms to put in place. Any approach that tended to limit this complementary aspect would be extremely negative.

What would be your advice to achieve the balance that you are talking about?

There are techniques that exist, but above all, you need to know how to improvise. Technically, you need to ensure that the development (or revision) of a standard is as participatory as possible and involves all the different stakeholders. First of all, you need to map the stakeholders involved, taking two variables into consideration: the impact that they can have on the standard and the impact that the standard can have on them.

Next, participation needs to be much more than just consultation: you therefore need to analyse and understand the negotiating power of these stakeholders and rebalance this as much as possible in the decision-making mechanisms. These mechanisms need to be defined in advance and should not change once the process is underway. In my opinion – and in my experience – this is the only way to create an environment where the weakest parties in a negotiation are not dominated by the most powerful parties (who generally insist that decisions will be fair due to their benevolence).

You also have to think of each step outside the box to consider the potential impact of the standard, even beyond its operational framework. This is easier when you are revising an existing standard because you have experience with the existing version. In this case, you should only change what is necessary, and change no more than is needed to resolve the problem. And you need to identify the real problems. For example, if a standard is not used a lot by a potential category of users: is the problem related to the standard itself, to the communication related to the standard, and/or incentives (or counter-incentives) to do with its use? And lastly, is it really the case, or is it simply a perception?

In any case, you need a great deal of finesse, based on solid experience of standardisation and its verification methods, beyond a single sector which, by definition, will have its prejudices.

What do you think about the Nutriset Group’s experience?

This confirms that you can’t develop a standard without a holistic vision of its different impacts, beyond the issue that it is supposed to tackle. This means that ALL the parties involved should participate significantly. It also confirms that standards that are purely performance-related are only relevant for well-defined processes that are carried out in well-defined conditions.

The idea of providing food that is safe is a laudable objective. But it’s obvious that the institutions who developed these foods were wearing blinkers…