Why a fragmented world rewrites the rules of standardization
Possible scenarios and strategies for the sustainability of standards bodies.
Thumbnail photo by Marjan Blan on Unsplash.
The world order as we know it since the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall is now behind us. The period of “Happy Globalization”, as economists and think tanks now like to describe it, going roughly from the early 1980s to around 2010, was based on three main pillars:
A belief in the liberalization of trade and investments.
The delegation of technical rule‑making to private and semi‑private standards and regulatory bodies.
The use of international standards as the primary technical infrastructure for integrating markets and reducing regulatory friction.
During that period, voluntary, consensus-based standardization created immense public value. Today the world is fragmented and the standardization ecosystem is under growing structural pressure driven by geopolitical forces. In this article, I will explore the profound changes that are reshaping standardization, develop potential future scenarios, and present strategies that standards bodies can adopt to survive and remain influential.
