Although the latter group, labelled "quality guarantors for civil society", is not directly involved in the production and purchase of forest carbon credits, it is crucial in the context of the topic because it scrutinises, evaluates, and communicates the quality and robustness of forest carbon credits, projects and standards.
The civil society actors act as quality guarantors and communication tools determining standards' integrity and the usefulness of their activities.
Last but not least, a critical aspect of legitimacy is the governmental endorsement of standards mentioned by buyers and quality guarantors.
The project-specific socio-economic and environmental conditions require individual, long-term designs, considering the long lifetimes of forest projects, as explained by project developers and quality guarantors.
Provenance, that's the word - knowing where your food comes from, names and individual farms being the guarantor of quality.
Women entrepreneurs who are working jointly in economic groups guarantee themselves to acquire loans from microfinance institutions, by using the group as guarantor.
(Those who follow jazz in New York will see those names as guarantors of quality).
And, increasingly, supermarkets, further down the distribution chain, are also starting to be seen as guarantors of quality.
The other guarantor of literary quality, copyediting, is becoming a lost art.
Here, as elsewhere, an informed and vigilant citizenry may be the best guarantor of both quality and fairness.
