AA1000 standards get new seven-strong board

Prominent CSR figures have been chosen to serve on an Interim Standards Board for the AA1000 series of standards.  
The new seven-member board will serve for a period of one year and will have a mandate to establish a permanent board by May 2012.  

The Interim Standards Board replaces the Voluntary Standards Board whose nine members resigned en masse earlier this year in protest at what they saw as threats to the independence of the standards posed by AccountAbility, the UK-based body that established them (EP12, issue 9, p1).

The seven, chosen by a specially convened nomination committee, are:

• Anant Nadkarni, vice-president of group corporate sustainability at Tata ( India), who has previously been an AccountAbility standards board member
• Carol Adams, pro vice-chancellor (sustainability) at La Trobe University in Melbourne (Australia), the first university to use the AA1000 AccountAbility principles
• Ted Grant, special assistant to the president/chief of staff at the Rockefeller Foundation (US)
• Jason Perks, director of the Two Tomorrows consultancy (UK), and an experienced AA1000 AS Assurer
• John Scade, CSR consultant and qualified sustainability assurance practitioner, who translated the AA1000 APS & AS standards into Spanish following their revision in 2008
• Terence Jeyaretnam, director of Net Balance consultancy (Australia) and a current member of the AA1000APS/AS technical committee
• Kurt Ramin, global head of standards at AccountAbility, previously director and advisor to the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation.

Roger Adams, director of special assignments for ACCA, the UK Association of Certified Chartered Accountants,  and chairman of the Interim Standards Board Nomination Committee, said members were selected on a number of criteria, including familiarity with AccountAbility and the AA1000 Series of Standards; experience of using the AA1000 Standards; experience in setting and developing sustainability or other relevant standards; and familiarity with best practices in organizational and standard-setting governance.

The interim board will provide oversight and guidance on the strategy and development of the AA1000 series of standards, while AccountAbility will continue to act as the secretariat and steward of AA1000 and have responsibility for financial and business matters.   

Adam said he was ‘confident that the new Interim Standards Board will help maintain and further the legitimacy and credibility of the AA1000 Standards’.

AccountAbility and the ISEAL Alliance recently launched a ‘strategy for scaling up the impacts of voluntary standards’, which is the culmination of an 18-month process to identify trends affecting the use of voluntary sustainability standards and to develop ‘a collective strategy for responding to those trends’.