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The development of an ISO social responsibility standard has fallen further behind schedule after a meeting in Austria decided that the current draft was not yet ready to be taken to the next stage.
It had been hoped that the latest version would be considered sufficiently advanced to move from the hands of a working group of more than 400 stakeholders and up to committee level.
However, delegates at the four-day fifth plenary meeting of the ISO Working Group on Social Responsibility decided that more work was needed before the current draft could go to committee.
The next opportunity to advance the draft standard will not be until the sixth plenary, scheduled for September in Santiago, Chile. As a result, the planned late-2009 launch of ISO 26000, as it will be known, will have to be put back until 2010 at the earliest. A social responsibility standard was first proposed within ISO in 2001.
In the meantime, however, the members of the working group have agreed that responsibility for producing a fourth working draft should be assumed by a new, and smaller, Integrated Drafting Task Force. In effect a staging post between the working group and the committee, the task force will stitch together and streamline the various parts of the draft standard that have been drawn up separately by six sub-groups.
Jorge Cajazeira, chair of the main working group, said the creation of the task force, which will have about 20 members, marked the end of a process under which parts of the standard have been drafted 'in silos'. He claimed its formation was 'a strong sign of the growing consensus among the different stakeholder groups involved'.
Swift progress on drawing up the standard has been hindered by the size of the working group, which is made up of representatives from business, non-governmental organizations, unions, governments and consumer groups from more than 70 countries.
The ISO created such a structure to ensure that the standard will reflect the full range of views, including those from interested parties in developing countries.
But one senior source involved in the process told EP that the inevitable outcome was an inability to move quickly. 'Many of us in Vienna - perhaps about 60 per cent - were keen to move to the committee draft, but there wasn't an overall consensus,' he said.
'In the end, it's the people who have the voice, and not the chairs of the various groups, who wanted to move on. This is the largest and most complex project the ISO has ever undertaken, and the way it is set up means there is nothing you can do about it. You can't really set a final date when you let the participants decide, so that I'm afraid it will take as long as it takes.'
Work started on drafting the document in 2004. It is being developed as a 'guidance standard' rather than a full-blown certification standard, and will only set out principles and offer advice to organizations wishing to use it.
ISO standards establish best practice in various fields, from specifications for vacuum cleaners to the layout of offices. They are created and overseen by the International Organization for Standardization, a federation of national standards bodies from 158 countries, but their use is entirely voluntary.
It had been hoped that the latest version would be considered sufficiently advanced to move from the hands of a working group of more than 400 stakeholders and up to committee level.
However, delegates at the four-day fifth plenary meeting of the ISO Working Group on Social Responsibility decided that more work was needed before the current draft could go to committee.
The next opportunity to advance the draft standard will not be until the sixth plenary, scheduled for September in Santiago, Chile. As a result, the planned late-2009 launch of ISO 26000, as it will be known, will have to be put back until 2010 at the earliest. A social responsibility standard was first proposed within ISO in 2001.
In the meantime, however, the members of the working group have agreed that responsibility for producing a fourth working draft should be assumed by a new, and smaller, Integrated Drafting Task Force. In effect a staging post between the working group and the committee, the task force will stitch together and streamline the various parts of the draft standard that have been drawn up separately by six sub-groups.
Jorge Cajazeira, chair of the main working group, said the creation of the task force, which will have about 20 members, marked the end of a process under which parts of the standard have been drafted 'in silos'. He claimed its formation was 'a strong sign of the growing consensus among the different stakeholder groups involved'.
Swift progress on drawing up the standard has been hindered by the size of the working group, which is made up of representatives from business, non-governmental organizations, unions, governments and consumer groups from more than 70 countries.
The ISO created such a structure to ensure that the standard will reflect the full range of views, including those from interested parties in developing countries.
But one senior source involved in the process told EP that the inevitable outcome was an inability to move quickly. 'Many of us in Vienna - perhaps about 60 per cent - were keen to move to the committee draft, but there wasn't an overall consensus,' he said.
'In the end, it's the people who have the voice, and not the chairs of the various groups, who wanted to move on. This is the largest and most complex project the ISO has ever undertaken, and the way it is set up means there is nothing you can do about it. You can't really set a final date when you let the participants decide, so that I'm afraid it will take as long as it takes.'
Work started on drafting the document in 2004. It is being developed as a 'guidance standard' rather than a full-blown certification standard, and will only set out principles and offer advice to organizations wishing to use it.
ISO standards establish best practice in various fields, from specifications for vacuum cleaners to the layout of offices. They are created and overseen by the International Organization for Standardization, a federation of national standards bodies from 158 countries, but their use is entirely voluntary.
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