Rio fallout (or The Post that Should Have Been)

It becomes a post on 'reader saturation' to itself be short.

In the previous post I had promised that this one would try to sort, for reader interest, through the waves of post-Rio+20 commentary, especially as it related to Africa; but the sheer bewildering volume of it put me off.

The flowering of many perspectives and initiatives on issues of the corporate role in sustainable development is a good thing. However, the Rio aftermath and the related informational and analytical saturation had me wondering whether some larger, singular, guiding message risks being obscured by the myriad of things policymakers and advocates need to follow just to keep a grasp on these evolving debates across all aspects of social and economic development.

I know few colleagues who read even a fraction of what they think they need to read. I know many who feel spread thin across the many dimensions of current trends of sustainable-responsible-corporate-development-stuff. I spoke recently to a senior sustainability executive at a global branded foodstuffs firm who said his staff spend so much time reporting and reacting to the many initiatives and campaigns that they seldom stopped to ask simple questions about what they could do more of and less of in terms of mitigating their social and environmental footprint and creating shared value.

At the African Mining Indaba in Cape Town in February, I heard a senior executive from a global mining firm list (exhaustively) and then bemoan the huge variety of sector-specific and general multistakeholder and other schemes and initiatives and campaigns on which his staff tried to satisfy reporting obligations and expectations. Does the mining firm faced with multiple schemes really become a better and more proactive corporate citizen, or is there a risk that its energies (and the talents of its individual staff members) get diverted and dispersed down multiple channels?

This short post offered no insights or comprehensive overview into Rio+20 events and outcomes and implications. Yet we all mainly know what the gist of it is. Let the work begin, let the words be thin?

Jo