Business, peace and regulatory approaches

This post comes from Oslo, ahead of tomorrow's 'Business for Peace' award and summit.

The award was initiated by the B4P Foundation to recognise firms and business leaders that have made a special contribution to promoting the prospects for peace, either locally or (I suppose) on a net global basis.

The summit itself seems largely devoted to much broader 'sustainable business' themes. Adopting a nerdy hat, i'd have to say that more research is needed to support the (intuitive) proposition that sustainability approaches are also peace-enhancing ones.

The idea of recognition and other positive incentives reflects a sound regulatory approach that does not simply conceive of business as a source of possible conflict risk.

Much of the literature on business + peace / conflict is on the negative impacts that investment or business activity can have on peacebuilding, for example directed to conflict links in global supply chains, for example in the mining sector.

This is only part of the story. Awards like the Oslo one do not necessarily have significant impact, but the idea of recognition goes to the heart of a regulatory approach that seeks to harness the incentives, resources, etc of business in support of public policy objectives.

This approach informs my book Regulating Business for Peace (see link below) -- captured in this quote at the front of the book (Bardach and Kagan, 1982):

"[T]he social responsibility of regulators, in the end, must be not simply to impose controls, but to activate and draw upon the conscience and the talents of those they seek to regulate..."

The idea of measuring a business's net contribution to peace even in local settings, by the way, is a very complex one. This June sees the publication of our report from Chatham House exploring (in some factual scenarios) the merit of propositions that natural resource development in fragile states can have a 'peace-positive' effect.

This involves some tricky concepts, and for the most part business does not see a role in overt or explicit contributions to consolidating peace. It sees the scope of its proper role as efforts to 'do no harm', in terms of adopting conflict-sensitive approaches.

Public policy should be comfortable with that, while regulatory approaches should look to catalyse continuous improvement in business conduct -- social contributions well beyond mere compliance with minimum standards.

For some previous posts on this topic, and book link, see here. 

Jo