FTC hearing #11: Reimagining international initiatives in a changing world
This week, Consumers International’s Advocacy Director, Justin Macmullan, spoke at a US Federal Trade Commission hearing about the role of international recommendations and guidelines in a changing world. Below is a summary of what he said.
Consumers International has a long history of supporting the development of international agreements and recommendations through the United Nations, the OECD, the G20 and other international organisations.
We do it because getting people together to share their experience and expertise helps to create principles, best practices and common approaches that are a valuable reference point for people in government, business and civil society seeking to support consumers around the world.
These international initiatives help to deliver change by influencing ideas and conversations. They can also form the framework for future legislation and regulation. This ability to support good policy and common approaches is more important than ever in a world where markets are increasingly connected, and consumers increasingly share the same experiences no matter which region or country they are in.
Whilst we continue to support these international initiatives, we also support efforts to help them have even more impact in the future. Here are three suggestions that we think will help.
1. Become quicker and more agile
To be relevant, international guidelines and recommendations need to address the challenges consumers are facing today, but as the the pace of change in today’s economy is exponential and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. This creates a real challenge for international processes that have to build consensus and tend to be cautious rather than bold, relying on tried and tested national policies that might not exist in new areas.
It took 30 years to agree the first comprehensive revision of the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection and 15 years to revise the OECD recommendations on e-commerce. But it took WhatsApp just eight years to gain its first 1 billion daily users - and that is not an unusual rate of growth for some new consumer services.
To keep up, international organisations need faster and more agile approaches to initiate and develop international guidance. Fortunately, there are signs of change: the two revisions mentioned above were agreed in 2015 and 2016 respectively and from AI to IoT, new issues are definitely on the international agenda.
2. Support implementation
Most international agreements tend to be high level and principles based. In order to implement them, countries need support to work out how to apply them in their context – this can be particularly challenging in countries which have different legal traditions or less resources. Projects, toolkits and checklists can help, but to be really useful they have to be developed with the stakeholders that will be using them.
Implementation can also be delivered through the marketplace. The revised UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection now include Good Business Practices and, although not an alternative to regulation, working with companies to develop new policies and practices can help to deliver change for some consumers much more quickly, or achieve standards that go beyond what is required in regulation.
3. Work with others
With the fast pace of development in consumer markets, no one organisation can claim to have all the answers – it makes sense to work with others. In recent years, international processes have been more open to voices from civil society and the private sector. Consumer groups have a valuable role to play in helping governments understand issues and support effective implementation, and with the right protocols in place, companies that support positive consumer outcomes can make an important contribution as well.
International processes also need to work with each other. In addition to the organisations referred to at the start, Consumers International also works with the International Organisation for Standardisation to support the development of international standards. Although these standards are voluntary, they have considerable legitimacy as a result of their multi-stakeholder processes and are widely used by companies and often integrated or referenced in regulation.
It should also be remembered that trade agreements have a major impact on consumers. Consumers International has recently launched a consumer checklist of issues that trade negotiators should support in their negotiations. To be effective these issues do not have to be included in a binding agreement but could be used to reinforce the need for co-operation in other processes.
Join us at our 2019 Summit
Would you like to be part of the discussion about how to respond the challenges of speed, implementation and co-operation in the digital economy and society? Join leaders from the consumer movement, business and government at the Consumers International’s Summit in Estoril, Portugal on 30 April and 1 May.
