In your view, what are the advantages and disadvantages of voluntary agreements such as the Kimberly Process and the EITI? Voluntary agreements at industry or country level are becoming very popular in the last years as a way to tackle severe issues that are affecting countries all around the Globe. Although the main scope is really deserving, I think that such organization have a limited room to make a real impact in their grounds. Such organizations are pretty visible in terms of politics: local politicians can use the argument of successfully joining certificating institutions to sustain their own political role. This may represent a strong incentive for eligible countries to actively join such organizations and make all the required steps. Such incentive may be reinforced by international pressure: in any case when the sovra‐national organizations favor the joining of such institutions, eligible countries may be spurred to take action, at least in the early phases of the process. As a second advantage, I’d mention the fact that such organizations can leverage their independency (from both politics and countries) to quickly establish a strong credibility and a strong consensus amongst their audiences (a problem that, for example, EITI was clearly facing). To maintain and further increase such credibility is another point of debate. Although the aforementioned advantages, there are several major pitfalls that impair the effectiveness of such organizations. First, they completely miss ruling enforcement systems. As independent and external institutions, they cannot go beyond the ejection from membership of countries that do not follow the set of agreed standards. There is no possibility for EITI of Kimberly Process to force a country to change its own laws or rules. They have only a moral suasion power, i.e. treating to eject countries not willing to agree with the defined standard, or at maximum refuse the membership. Unless such membership represents something that people consider as extremely essential (which is not the case of both the organizations under discussion) the impact of losing the membership can be easily mitigated by local politicians (especially if they have an interest on such loss). This situation is highlighted by the Kimberly Process case, where it was unable to both force countries to keep blood diamonds away and to actively involve governments in enforcing such compliance. Another disadvantage relies on the sustainability of being credible: in order to be credible it takes to determine a globally agree code of conduit to be enforced, and especially to make up a set of measurements and statistics that can objectively demonstrate the degree of compliance of every country at a given date. This action is very complex, and consistency amongst countries is almost impossible to be reached without a full support of local governments (which in many cases is difficult to get since they are corrupted and actively involved in fostering bad practices). As a conclusion, I believe that voluntary organizations may reach interesting results in enforcing code of conducts regarding issues with high visibility and low impact on industries and countries standards. If companies and/or countries can get a sensible visibility and reward while not altering significantly their way of operating, the certifying organization is going to be a success (this

statement may be applied to the Marine Stewardship Council, who was facing severe difficulties – mainly related to the impact of the proposed code of conduit on common business practices ‐ although the public recognition of the certification was somehow rising). In any case when criminality and violation of human rights and common ground ethical values are involved, I believe that we need Governments to take action directly. At the end of the day, this is exactly their job, and what they are expected to do.