Shared Responsibility Working Group

To reach scale and sustainability, there is an urgency for commitment to collective action through shared responsibility and accountability. As such, the RSPO Shared Responsibility Working Group (SRWG) was established in May 2020 to work on the practical implementation of Shared Responsibility requirements, as detailed in the RSPO Board of Governors (BoG) endorsed ‘Shared Responsibility and Implementation’ document (31 October 2019). This document provides the definition of Shared Responsibility and the procedures applicable to selected non-producer ordinary members and also included the outline for an implementation mechanism for the reporting of SR requirements, built on existing RSPO systems and mechanisms.

Background

The concept of Shared Responsibility (SR) has been discussed and agreed upon for a number of years across RSPO membership. While the RSPO Principles and Criteria (P&C) are applicable to the production of sustainable palm oil, clause 3.2 of the RSPO Code of Conduct for Members, applicable to all members, requires: “Members to whom the P&C do not apply directly will implement parallel standards relevant to their own organisation, which cannot be lower than those set out in the P&C.”

A Shared Responsibility Task Force (SRTF) was formed in March 2019 to define more explicitly what SR means, i.e. the SR requirements, and outline what implementation would look like. They developed a set of shared requirements which are the same across all membership categories, but for each category, different actions may be required to achieve the shared goal. Additionally, some requirements may not be applicable to some membership categories due to the nature of the requirement in question (e.g. buying of CSPO, which is not applicable to the NGO and Financial Institution Categories).

This TF developed the draft of the ‘Shared Responsibility and Implementation’ document, which was later endorsed by the BoG and the TF has now been disbanded. Documents from the SRTF can be found here.

The topics covered by SR are as follows:

Role of the RSPO Shared Responsibility Working Group (SRWG)

Over the course of 2 years, the SRWG members will be working with the support of RSPO Secretariat. In Year 1, this includes working with a technical facilitation team (Proforest and LiSeed) on the development of procedural and/ or guidance documents, the incentives and sanctions system, as well as the resourcing plan for transformation. 

The SRWG will regularly monitor activities and outputs through performance monitoring and Key Performance Indicators, as well as review the implementation of Shared Responsibility towards the end of Year 1. This end of year review (evaluation) will be used to make adjustments and recommendations for the following years (Year 2 and 3).

Every year, the SRWG will review the progress on SR requirements, identify barriers and issues, as well as specifically review the CSPO supply and demand projections. They will also propose a projection-based percentage figure for the uptake of CSPO volumes for supply chain membership categories to the BoG for Year 2 and Year 3. 

Composition of the RSPO SRWG

Members