'Business for Peace'

What drives current expectations that the private sector will play a more direct role in ensuring more peaceful societies?

This week's UN Global Compact 'Business for Peace' event in Istanbul is part of a growing field, as it were.

This field is dedicated to exploring the unrealised potential for business entities, communities and actors to contribute appropriately -- in more explicit, direct or deliberate ways -- to conflict prevention, mitigation or resolution in particular situations or more generally, and especially in fragile or divided societies.

This is the topic of my forthcoming book Regulating Business for Peace by Cambridge Univ. Press. There is a big, complex and evolving research and policy agenda here. There are plenty of ways into the debate, too, from practically-minded policy prescriptions on how businesses (and their financiers, insurers, etc) can be more conflict-sensitive in their operations and supply-chains, to understanding what incentives might help to promote responsible but competitive investment in fragile states.

These issues are topical, and highly relevant in much of sub-Saharan Africa. I could blog on, book and beyond, but instead think one observation is important. Much of the 'Business for Peace' / business and peace / business and conflict debate focuses on what business actors should do more or less of or do differently, and under what circumstances. To my mind this partly misses the issue.

This focus on business responsibilities or opportunities to help promote or consolidate peace is driven by various things, and is part of a wider shift in the expectations of business in society. In large part it is driven by recognition that more can be drawn out of the peace-relevant influence, incentives, impacts and attributes of the private sector; in some ways it is driven by business leaders' own sense of the need for the private sector to be more proactive in ensuring the sorts of peaceful, prosperous societies conducive to sustainable growth.

Yet what can be lost in this focus, and at events such as Istanbul, is that the proper way to frame this issue is not 'what can business do for peace and how' but surely 'what must public policy do to maximise the scope for business to contribute to peace'.

This is really reiterating an earlier post this year: here. It also is a theme of other posts that reflect on how business has gone from being an ignored stakeholder in the development agenda, to a presumed panacea for developmental problems.

To express caution on taking 'business for peace' too far is not to deny the scope for business actors to do more to mitigate conflict risk and maximise social cohesion. It is not to bring everything back to policy or make any worthwhile initiative contingent on government action.

Instead it is to recognise that the greater focus on the role of business is no substitute for recognition that business has limited scope, incentives, legitimacy (etc) for peace-building. The growing enthusiasm for realising business's unmet peace-building potential should thus not obscure that the primary question is a public policy one; the primary responsibilities rest with governments; any failure by business to contribute more positively (or less negatively) to peace is ultimately a public policy failure.

Jo