It is June -- and so a year since the UN Human Rights Council endorsed, on 16 June 2011, the Guiding Principles on implementing its 2008 'protect, respect and remedy' framework on business and human rights.
This month also sees the 'corporate sustainability forum' taking place around the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development. Our firm has been helping provide input: in coming blogposts I'll reflect on forum issues -- how to scale-up responsible business practices and develop appropriate public-private-NGO partnerships and collaboration on development issues.
The GPs and Framework were not intended to foreclose further elaboration of the nature, source and scope of international standards of business conduct affecting human rights. Nevertheless, since the GPs' adoption attention has shifted from the content of the framework of norms to practical issues around their implementation. Some major firms with the resources to do so (and which hadn't already) can be found 'retrofitting' their internal sustainability and other policies and procedures to account for the GPs. Meanwhile it is now less remarkable to see governments explicitly including 'business and human rights' on the agenda of bilateral discussions and communiques (the recent UK-Colombia joint government statement is an example). Now five years ago that would have been most unusual.
There are a host of issues worth blogging on here, but the nub of this week's post is buried in the paragraph above: resources. The June 2011 endorsement was historic, but only time will tell if the GPs were fated by being born into an age of Western governmental austerity and flat growth -- and related caution by corporations with their cash reserves. The sort of government support one might have imagined being given to national and UN-level follow-up to the GPs' endorsement is unlikely to materialise; while major firms may still mainstream the GPs into their operations and strategy, global economic gloom is probably undermining internal and external constituencies for such change, especially outside the world's biggest and highest-profile branded corporations.
Those who study and work in this field often talk of the 'business case' for taking responsible business conduct seriously and adding 'people' and 'planet' to the bottom-line of 'profit'. The 'case for the business case' is likely to be tested in what lies ahead in the wider economic picture.
An optimistic view is that some business leaders will press ahead -- perhaps even more so in the circumstances -- with innovative social investment, corporate responsibility and shared civil-corporate value initiatives. I'll subscribe to that view, if only for the sake of it; austerity will do all manner of things to existing perceptions of what is an appropriate or usual role for the private sector. (Indeed, if one needed persuading of this, last month's first privately-funded space station replenishment mission is food for thought). This blog hopes to chart these changes. Whether to insulate themselves better from social risks or grievances, or to seize new opportunities, some businesses at least in most OECD countries may find themselves persuaded to innovate or lead on social impact issues in ways that we might not expect. Not all such change is cause for alarm.
A less optimistic view is that prevailing mindsets still see many sustainability issues -- both human rights and the Rio+20 enviro-focussed agenda -- as added extras or luxuries. Thus in practical terms those inside policymaking circles in government and around the business boardroom who seek to take forward the GPs (and the whole wider transformation they represent) could well find that process a lot harder now than it might have been had the GPs been born in the higher-growth period of the mid-2000s. Despite the imperatives and incentives for sustainability innovations of the sort to be discussed in Rio this month, the climate of economic uncertainty may undermine what we need to do to change our impact on the climate ...
Jo
References
The UN's 2011 endorsement is here (it also sets out the mandate for the UN working group 'going forward'). The Guiding Principles are here, and the 2008 Framework is here. The Rio+20 corporate sustainability forum page is here.
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