Accreditation and Certification as Innovation Infrastructures for HSE and ESG Professional Competence in Italy and the European Union

Abstract

The increasing regulatory and managerial complexity of Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) domains has generated a growing demand for reliable, transparent, and comparable professional competences. In Italy, this demand is being addressed through a distinctive interaction between legislation on non-regulated professions, UNI technical standardisation, Accredia accreditation, and European conformity assessment principles. This paper analyses accreditation and certification as innovation infrastructures for HSE and ESG professionalisation, with specific reference to HSE Manager, HSE Specialist, Sustainability/ESG Manager, and Sustainability/ESG Practitioner. The study adopts a mixed legal–managerial methodology based on documentary analysis of Italian and European legal sources, accreditation rules, UNI technical standards, and EU competence and reporting frameworks. The findings show that certification of HSE and ESG professionals is not merely a formal qualification mechanism, but an institutional innovation that transforms dispersed professional experience into auditable, portable, and market-recognised competence. In the HSE field, UNI 11720:2025 and Accredia Circular DC No. 25/2025 have introduced a more articulated model distinguishing between HSE Specialist and HSE Manager. In the ESG field, UNI/PdR 109.1:2021 provides the technical basis for Sustainability Manager and Sustainability Practitioner, while the broader EU sustainability ecosystem—CSRD, ESRS, and GreenComp—creates new managerial demand for verified competences. The paper concludes that accreditation-based certification can become a strategic tool for organisational resilience, regulatory compliance, and labour-market innovation, provided that it avoids misleading claims, maintains independence from training markets, and evolves in line with ISO/IEC 17024:2026 and emerging digital assessment technologies.