Selecting a Certification Body in the Fair Trade Market: The Importance of Strategic Capabilities and Cooperative Behavior

The literature on fair trade provides important insights into the functioning of a specific market, the profile of its actors and its certification process. However, it does not address how industry players (producers, distributors, importers, associations holding a fair trade label) choose their certification body. Yet this is an important topic. Indeed, fair trade is presented as a multi-stakeholder partnership, and alliance literature suggests the importance of the process of selecting partners in successful partnerships. In this paper, we propose a typology of the selection criteria that actors in fair trade may use, building on the literature on alliances. These selection criteria refer to the strategic capacities of the potential partner and its propensity to adopt a cooperative behavior. Our framework meets partially objectives and methods of behavioral strategy. We also present the fair trade system and the results of our exploratory study to better understand the real behavior of actors in selecting a certification body in the fair trade market. We find that producers play a secondary role in the selection of the certification body, unlike importers, distributors and associations holding a fair trade label. We also find that these last actors base their choice on three of the four categories of selection criteria identified in the literature on alliances (capability, compatibility, commitment, and reliability of potential partners)