The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is a global sustainability initiative on sustainable palm oil. Members of RSPO, and participants in its activities, come from many different backgrounds, including plantation companies, processors and traders, consumer goods manufacturers and retailers of palm oil products, financial institutions, environmental NGOs and social NGOs, from many countries that produce or use palm oil. Together these organisations have developed rules for production and trade of sustainable produced palm oil, the Principles and Criteria for the Production of Sustainable Palm Oil. Palm oil producers, producing in accordance with this standard can get certified against this standard. RSPO Standards and supporting documents are developed through a consensus-driven process. This includes RSPO multi-stakeholder members participating within the relevant supporting bodies, feedback from the general public and contributions from interested stakeholders through a public consultation.
The cross-border social dialogue component
RSPO’s Working Groups and Task Forces are set up with the aim of creating a focused platform for members to discuss complex challenges and work towards developing solutions. The groups discuss and develop standards/documents relating to specific issues identified by the Standard Standing Committee (SSC) or RSPO Board of Governors (BoG). They are made up of a representative from each of the seven membership stakeholder groups (see above) and are periodically created to deal with a specific issue.
- The Human Rights Working Group (“HRWG”) is the advisory body for human rights, labour rights, social standards and community management issues within the RSPO. It was stablished to provide strategic and technical advice to support the effective implementation of the relevant RSPO Principles and Criteria (P&C), in particular criteria which relate to human rights. 3 seats are granted to the social NGO (out of 20) and one of them is occupied by a representative from the Dutch union organisation (CNV Internationaal) who is in addition co-chair of this group. Within this working group, decisions will be reached by consensus by members.
- The Shared Responsibility Working Group (SRWG) work on the practical implementation of RSPO Shared Responsibility requirements (a set of responsibilities RSPO members must commit to). The Terms of Reference for this working group provide for a minimum of 1 representative each for Banks, environnemental NGOs and social NGOs to balanced representation. An Indonesian trade union representative (Hukatan) sit in this working group.