Strengthening the Compliance of the OIC Member States
to International Standards
26
economic costs and benefits of international harmonization, and then developing a political process that
ensures sufficient buy-in from local consumers and producers.
The situation is different in low capacity countries, such as many in the OIC’s African group. In these
countries, there is little pre-existing culture of standardization, the number of standards issued is small,
and quality infrastructure more generally may be in a rudimentary state, and not effective on the ground.
In this case, the issue is not, as it is in high capacity countries, bringing divergent national standards into
line with international standards. Instead, it is the use of international standards as national standards,
by translating them into local languages if necessary, and issuing them as national standards. The
process is therefore different: in most cases, there is no prior standard that needs to be amended or
repealed before international harmonization can take place. The critical constraint is therefore on the
capacity of the national standards body to assess the applicability of international standards to local
conditions, and then issue national documents. A further constraint is then the business use of standards
on the ground. In low capacity countries, many businesses operate outside formal frameworks, and so
are not used to complying with standards at all. A major shift is necessary to ensure that new
internationally harmonized standards are in fact used by business.
An issue that is related to international harmonization of product standards is mutual recognition of test
results and conformity assessment procedures. Even if a standard is harmonized, there need to be
procedures in place to ensure that products tested and found to be conforming in one country are
recognized as such in another country, without the need for costly retesting. Conceptually, two
approaches are open: mutual recognition, in which two or more countries agree to recognize each
other’s conformity assessment procedures, and unilateral recognition, in which one country decides to
accept results from elsewhere under certain circumstances. Both approaches eliminate the need for
testing in both the exporting and importing countries, and therefore can save costs for business.
However, experience around the world suggests that mutual recognition agreements are typically
difficult to negotiate on a sufficiently broad basis: proceeding by country pair means that countries have
to invest major time and resources in ensuring that their goods can easily move to all key markets. Such
an approach may be outside the financial, human, and technical capacities of smaller developing
countries, which makes the unilateral approach potentially appealing. Similarly, there is scope for
groups of countries to progress on mutual recognition, perhaps in tandem with development of
internationally harmonized standards on a regional basis. The two do not always go together, but it is a
pairing with some conceptual appeal and concrete economic interest. The remainder of this section
discusses the ways in which these ideas are put into effect in OIC member states at the present time.