The changing landscape of sustainability governance. What next for Voluntary Sustainability Standards VSS?
On 31 March and 1 April 2025, the Academic Advisory Council (AAC) of the United Nations Forum on Sustainability Standards (UNFSS) met for the fifth time in Bonn.
The AAC meetings bring together academic and policy experts from international organizations and national platforms to discuss research on VSS and their role as a transnational sustainability governance instrument. The starting point of the meeting lay in the observation that the global sustainability governance landscape is rapidly changing.
Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) arose as voluntary, market-based instruments to address sustainability issues in an era characterized by the rise of global value chains (GVCs) and high levels of economic cooperation, despite political differences. Yet, a new global order is emerging which is far more fragmented and confrontational in nature and characterized by more diverse regulatory approaches.
On the one hand, we observe a strong trend towards deregulation and less engagement with the sustainability agenda. On the other hand, we observe an embedding of sustainability commitments in public policy tools, including in free trade agreements (e.g., the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS), EFTA-Indonesia Agreement) and through a strengthening of sustainability regulation, such as mandatory sustainability due diligence regulatory (MDDR) measures, which have gained significant attention.
This latter dynamic embodies a shift from soft law to hard law regarding firms' sustainability obligations. Concomitantly, several other tools are on the rise which also ultimately strive to bring about corporate accountability, such as smart policy-mixes, different reporting requirements, jurisdictional approaches, sustainable investment, Environmental Social Governance (ESG), and enhanced product traceability, among others. All these developments will impact VSS and co-evolve in interaction with them.
The previous UNFSS AAC meeting held in 2023 focused on the gaps and synergies between mandatory sustainability due diligence measures and VSS. Discussions led to the publishing of the 6th UNFSS Flagship report “The Future of Sustainable Trade: Due diligence initiatives, voluntary sustainability standards and developing countries”.
Building on this, the 2025 UNFSS AAC meeting on “The Changing Landscape of Sustainability Governance: What Next for VSS?” explored:
- The role of VSS in a new international political context and what this means for VSS, policymaking and research and
- The key knowledge gaps which remain in research on VSS and what the research needs are to address them (see programme of the meeting in Annex 1).
In addition to academic experts and policy experts from international organizations and national platforms, representatives from VSS organizations were also invited to the meeting to share their insights into how their organizations are adapting to new geopolitical, geoeconomic and regulatory realities (see list of participants in Annex 2).
The UNFSS AAC 2025 2-day meeting, organized in Bonn, was structured around 4 panels on key topics related to VSS. Each panel consisted of a set of 10-minute presentations by both academics and practitioners to raise insights and points for discussion, followed by a roundtable discussion where all participants were invited to contribute.
