What is Sustainable? Literature and Empirical Palm Oil Certification

In almost every cycle of upstream and downstream activities in the management and use of palm oil, there is certification for companies, farmers, providers, plantations, processing, distribution, etc. So, what is actually sought from certification, what is sustainability aimed at, which aspects of certification have a sustainability impact? As seen from empirical studies and literature, there were 265 research articles published in 2008 - 2023 with the search keyword Palm Oil Certification indexed by Scopus for analysis using VOSviewer 1.6.19 software. There are differences in the object of study in palm oil producing regions, especially on the Asian continent, which focuses on how the government carries out certification activities and how independent smallholders can meet existing certification standards, while the European and American continents focus on testing whether certification activities and implementation of certification have been done as they should be.