International Conference, 29 - 30 October 2008, Berlin

The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) initiated the international conference “Shaping Globalisation – Scaling up Voluntary Standards” in October 2008. More than 150 participants from civil society, governments, standard organisations, companies, producers, universities and researchers discussed how the standard environment has to be designed in order to achieve maximum impact.

In 2006, a diverse international community had met in the two days conference “Shaping Globalisation – Impacts of Voluntary Standards” to discuss what voluntary standards can achieve. The standards were then identified as a successful means of shaping globalisation in a socially fair, economically viable and environmentally responsible way. Also it became clear that standard application is still limited in scope. Therefore the essential question now is: How can the impacts of voluntary standards be scaled up? The follow up conference in 2008 was an excellent exchange platform and extremely inspiring for the next steps to be taken in order to scale up voluntary standards.

The conference documentation summarises the discussions and outcomes.  All speeches and presentations can be downloaded at: Further information.

• Conference Documentation 2008
  gtz2008-en-conference-documentation.pdf, 1.87 MB (englisch)