From standard takers to standard makers: The role of knowledge-intensive intermediaries in setting global sustainability standards

Standards are increasingly being geared towards addressing social and ecological concerns in global production networks, but to facilitate sustainable development locally, global standards need to integrate the context‐specific needs of actors in developing countries. However, most standards are still developed in the Global North, while the inclusion of actors from developing countries remains limited. Nonetheless, there is recent evidence of some countries from the Global South proactively influencing transnational and global standard setting and, in these processes, knowledge is a decisive factor. Accordingly, in this article we argue that a dynamic and knowledge‐based perspective can provide more detailed insights into how actors from developing countries contribute to standard setting processes. In this respect, special types of organizations – namely knowledge‐intensive intermediaries (KIIs) – play an essential, yet unrecognized, role. Here, to illustrate the strategies that KIIs use to influence global standard setting, we investigate the South African organization ‘Fair Trade in Tourism’.