The Roles of Standardization, Certification and Assurance Services in Global Commerce

In this article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of standardized product and process frameworks and a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe may increasingly be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce. This infrastructure is provided by a proliferation of performance codes and standards, many of which define acceptable social and environmental behavior, and a rapidly-growing number of privately-trained and authorized inspectors and certifiers that we call the third-party assurance industry. We offer reasons for this development, evidence of its scope and scale, and then describe the phenomenon in more detail by examining supply chain arrangements in two industries, food products and apparel, where the use of third-party standards and assurance services has expanded especially rapidly. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for the make or buy decision at the core of the theory of the firm. We argue that as quasi-regulatory standards are developed within various industries, and as performance to these standards can be systematically evaluated using third-party inspectors and certifiers, the costs of moving production outside of vertical firm hierarchies drop. We believe this may be an important factor in accelerating the shift to outsourcing that has been observed over the last two decades

Guidelines for evaluation performance of oyster habitat restoration

Restoration of degraded ecosystems is an important societal goal, yet inadequate monitoring and the absence of clear performance metrics are common criticisms of many habitat restoration projects. Funding limitations can prevent adequate monitoring, but we suggest that the lack of accepted metrics to address the diversity of restoration objectives also presents a serious challenge to the monitoring of restoration projects. A working group with experience in designing and monitoring oyster reef projects was used to develop standardized monitoring metrics, units, and performance criteria that would allow for comparison among restoration sites and projects of various construction types. A set of four universal metrics (reef areal dimensions, reef height, oyster density, and oyster size–frequency distribution) and a set of three universal environmental variables (water temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen) are recommended to be monitored for all oyster habitat restoration projects regardless of their goal(s). In addition, restoration goal‐based metrics specific to four commonly cited ecosystem service‐based restoration goals are recommended, along with an optional set of seven supplemental ancillary metrics that could provide information useful to the interpretation of prerestoration and postrestoration monitoring data. Widespread adoption of a common set of metrics with standardized techniques and units to assess well‐defined goals not only allows practitioners to gauge the performance of their own projects but also allows for comparison among projects, which is both essential to the advancement of the field of oyster restoration and can provide new knowledge about the structure and ecological function of oyster reef ecosystems

Procedures for evaluating and prioritising the removal of fish passage barriers: a synthesis

Techniques for assessing the impact of structural barriers on fish passage and for prioritising restoration actions are reviewed. Current survey methodologies are biased towards specific structures, primarily culverts and economically significant fish. Assessment criteria are often based on swimming capabilities of upstream migrating adult salmonids, while ignoring other life-stages, non-salmonid species, downstream migration and behaviour. The development of comprehensive and centrally owned geospatial inventories of barriers is essential. The collection, maintenance and dissemination of pertinent structural and environmental data can be technically, logistically and financially challenging. Standardised procedures are needed to rapidly and cost-effectively survey large numbers of barriers over wide geographic areas. The prioritisation of barrier repair and removal projects is most often based on simple cost-benefit analysis, whereby individual barriers are scored based on a set of assessment criteria and then ranked in order of priority. The benefits of using scoring-and-ranking systems, however, are unacceptably low because they consider barriers independently, thereby ignoring the cumulative, non-additive impacts produced by multiple, spatially interconnected structures. Optimisation modelling offers a more robust approach for efficiently prioritising decision making in river restoration planning, allowing decision makers to account for key uncertainties and effectively balance multiple, possibly competing, environmental and socioeconomic goals and constraints.<br/