This document reports on the pilot phase of the Landscape Assessment Framework in the context of the Sustainable Cocoa Landscapes project in San Martin, Peru. The social indicators that have been proposed by Max Havelaar / Flocert based on the prioritized social issues for the landscapes (see documents "social study of the landscapes" and "social issues in the Mariscal Caceres landscape") have been applied as a test in the landscape. The process followed for this pilot phase is summarized in paragraph 2, and the process of validation of the indicators is presented in paragraph 3.

The Living Income Community of Practice has designed a series of infographics that aids in the visualisation of the living income concept, measurement as well as the objectives of the community of practice. We encourage all within the community to use these infographics to keep the conversation going. ​Conditions for use: All the images are downloadable in a pdf format. It is advisable to use the graphics in its entirety. Also, we kindly request you credit the Living Income Community of Practice.

ISEAL has developed a good practice guide to help ensure that sustainability claims made by jurisdictions, landscape initiatives, and the companies that source from or support them, are credible. The guidance covers the structural and performance claims a jurisdictional entity may wish to make, along with the supporting action claims of other related stakeholders.

This document provides instruction to aid users in using the ODK tool. The function of the ODK tool within the Blueprint project has been to provide offline data collection capabilities and data that can be stored in SAN’s technology platform the iHub which provides a secure, agile, and scalable backend for the mobile app.

A matrix of indicators for use with farm owners and when using the ODK Mobile App, as part of the Blueprint Project. 

This report highlights lessons from pilot projects across five supply chains in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific between 2024 and 2025, and cover sugar, cocoa, cotton and flowers. It captures Fairtrade’s approach, key lessons learned, and practical considerations, when Fairtrade facilitated direct dialogue between companies and farmers/workers. It also offers practical guidance for businesses and third-party facilitators. It is aimed at companies and (potential) facilitators of meaningful rightsholder dialogue.

Assessing environmental and social sustainability at the landscape level poses significant challenges related to the availability of accurate cultural, economic, and ecological information. In this sector, decision-making must take this intersectional information into account to develop management strategies that enhance the sustainability of the territory, prevent detrimental actions to ecosystem services, and defend against poor socioeconomic management of a region.

This case study highlights how credible voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) support palm oil companies with regulatory requirements such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Featuring the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), it explores how VSS enable traceability, ensure legal production, and promote smallholder inclusion - helping businesses build deforestation-and conversion-free (DCF) supply chains that go beyond compliance.

In 2023, the Global Living Wage Coalition commissioned the Anker Research Institute and ISEAL to do a needs assessment aimed at gathering stakeholder views on the readiness to advance on living wages for tea workers in Assam and West Bengal. 

Between 29 September and 5 October 2021, Helvetas conducted a stakeholder consultation of the project "Sustainable Cocoa Landscapes in San Martin". The consultation was carried out through face-to-face workshops in the different districts of the province. This resulted in the prioritization of social issues to be taken forward by the project. 

This infographic provides a summary on boosting sustainability practice and performance at the landscape level, through Good Water Stewardship project. 

This page contains the final project outputs of the Expanding the Blueprint tool project, run by Sustainable Agriculture Network from September 2023-May 2024.

The Smart Assurance project supported by the ISEAL Innovations Fund until July 2024 developed and tested a new type of oversight process that combines the use of satellite data, analytical methods, and ground verification supported by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) with assessment practices to provide enhanced oversight both at scale and with a new level of granularity.

The paper provides insights on growth trends and geographic presence of seven ISEAL member schemes that are leading global agricultural standards across seven commodities. We focus on trends and presence in producing and exporting countries where these schemes are adopted, with a specific interest in presence in low and lower-income classified countries.

A compilation of the lessons learned from four pilot projects in remote auditing from Responsible Jewellery Council, LEAF Marque, Beter Cotton Initiative, and Fairtrade USA. LEAF Marque and the Responsible Jewellery Council looked at the extent to which remote auditing could provide an alternative to in-person on-site visits, while the two other pilot projects used a remote phone survey based on worker voice technology to carry out interviews with workers in factory settings (in the case of Fair Trade USA) and in an agricultural setting on cotton farms (Better Cotton Initiative – BCI).

In this report ISEAL offers insights from three baselines of evaluations that it commissioned in 2015 and were published in June 2016

Report produced for the ISEAL Alliance Innovations Fund project “Integrating new data to improve risk assessments and detection of forced labour vulnerability in agricultural supply chains”.

A Report produced for the ISEAL Alliance Innovations Fund project “Integrating new data to improve risk assessments and detection of forced labour vulnerability in agricultural supply chains”.

The ISEAL-funded research project Integrating new data to improve risk assessments and detection of forced labour in agricultural supply chains (2017 – 18) is an attempt to build the evidence base around monitoring and remediating forced labour in agricultural supply chains.

Moving towards an outcome-based standard creates the opportunity for LEAF to communicate more closely on the impacts of implementing the LEAF Marque Standard, measuring outcomes directly rather than proxying them with practices.

This one-hour session hosted by the Living Income Community of Practice (LICOP) explored how retailers are rethinking their role in advancing living income for smallholder farmers. Drawing on insights from existing retailer coalitions, like the German Retailers Working Group on Living Income and the Banana Retailers Group, this session reflected on how these initiatives have approached influencing change across complex commodity systems.

We are excited to launch the revision of the ISEAL Chain of Custody (CoC) Definitions and Models Guidance. The revision process will include:

Experts from ISEAL, and ISEAL members discuss what our research is telling us about the reach, contribution and impacts of standards on smallholder farmers and what this means for future innovations and partnerships.

In 2022, CGIAR's HER+ initiative researchers partnered with ISEAL to explore how sustainability systems are able to contribute to advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. Gender is a crosscutting theme in ISEAL’s strategic priority to power solutions to sustainability challenges.