FRANCE / SWITZERLAND, (ITC News) – The International Trade Centre (ITC) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have launched a joint publication, Understanding Sustainability Initiatives: A Typology Framework, offering a comprehensive and flexible system for navigating the growing landscape of sustainability initiatives.
This joint publication presents a structured framework designed to promote a shared understanding of the diverse nature of sustainability initiatives. Many have emerged over the last decades from a variety of stakeholders – including businesses, governments, and NGOs – to promote sustainable practices across global value chains.
Sustainability initiatives can relate to recycling, renewable energy, supply chain management, zero waste, and many others.
Each plays an important role, but their diversity has created confusion and uncertainty among users. At times, that confusion makes it hard to integrate them into policies.
The new ITC-OECD framework responds to these challenges, providing a common language and structured parameters to help policymakers, private-sector operators, and others to better understand the initiatives.
The report breaks down the complexity of sustainability initiatives across four key chapters: objective, scope, operations, and governance.
By organizing these initiatives into a simple framework, users can understand them in a value-neutral way, giving clarity in a fragmented landscape. This helps policymakers understand the purpose of a sustainability initiative and how it works.
For example, one differentiator shows whether a business can make a sustainability claim about their operations, products or services. Sustainability claims are messages that businesses can use to market their products or services as climate-friendly, for example.
This new framework was developed in consultation with the ITC-led Trade for Sustainable Development (T4SD) Technical Working Group and the OECD’s Centre for Responsible Business Conduct.
The report also reflects OECD’s commitment to supporting sustainable supply chains and responsible business conduct. By reducing confusion, promoting harmonization, and supporting a better understanding of sustainability initiatives, this framework contributes to more effective governance and enhanced collaboration, helping to build more sustainable and responsible global value chains.
