Cross-sector partnerships: fashion, fuzz and focus

This post marks six months to the summit to agree the next global development agenda, to replace the 2000-2015 MDGs (Millennium Development Goals).

Discussion of the Sustainable Development Goals is filled with the significance of cross-sector partnering as the key to unlocking development potential.

By 'cross-sector' is often (if not exclusively) meant 'public-private' and so the partnering agenda is, in large part, about more proactively engaging the worlds of business and finance in the world's development.

If 2015 is the 'year of partnerships', what is at stake?

Any good contribution on this topic needs to address, at a minimum (a) what sorts of activities might be meant by the broad term 'partnership' or 'partnering'; and (b) the many assumptions that attend the rhetoric on this issue: assumptions about trust (between business and government), and about aligned incentives and adequate capacities for long-term sustained partnering.

This is vital since (as often when UN summits loom) there is a tendency towards self-reinforcing rhetoric, persistent refrains that reinforce fashions while often losing sight of opportunity costs and risks.

The fashion for cross-sector partnering risks erecting this very difficult, emerging set of practices as the development panacea without adequately theorising, testing, illustrating. 

It also risks distancing states from their development obligations by suggesting that the main vector for development requires the cooperation of business and others. Yes, collaborative development holds great promise, but development failures cannot simply be put (in future) to the failure of partnerships. These fail all the time, in many areas of life.

A blogger on this -- or any -- issue should offer variety along with some attempt at insight, opinion, information.

This is true even for an occasional (roughly fortnightly) blog like this one.

Yet when a topic is complex, surrounded by mediocre inputs, and very important, I think a blogger adds value simply by passing on something worth reading.

Of all the pieces I've read in 2015, this World Vision report perhaps best sets out the issues and meets its title's promise of 'advancing debate' -- if only by promising to help clarify what the debate is, and so separate fashion and fuzz from topics that need focus. (It follows some earlier excellent briefings from that organisation on this topic).

For the most recent thoughts on this issue on this blog, see here.

Jo

Business and human rights: framing issues

If the 'business and human rights' agenda becomes about everything, it will end up standing for (and achieving) nothing.

I noted this in a recent Chatham House paper referred to in the previous post.

This week, The Economist released a report showing how unsure business people are about what is required of them in relation to a responsibility to respect human rights.

I suppose my perspective is shaped by a legal background, such that to describe something in human rights terms is to suggest that one is dealing with activity that impairs recognised rights, activity with legal consequences, invoking all the regulatory power of profound universal norms.

This is not how the current 'business and human rights' (BHR) debate proceeds, as my paper noted. 

Instead, as a roundtable in London yesterday reinforced, many proponents see the BHR debate as very broad, relating to issues from 'tax justice' to 'casualisation of labour'. In none of these areas can it credibly be said that a business violates someone's human rights in ways that international (or even national) law, as it exists today, would recognise.

The BHR agenda is, I think, at something of a cross-roads.

The breadth of the BHR agenda and the resonance of framing things as 'human rights' is part of its power, power that might contribute to shifting the very nature of capitalism and the corporation's role in society.

Framed positively, the conversation can be one about how to solve social problems and create shared value, not about narrow issues of compliance, liability, remedy.

Yet the very power that the BHR project has is derived from the fact that 'human rights' are norms recognised, over time and by the consensus of states, as deserving special protection as a function of their universality. Seen this way, it may be tempting to recruit 'human rights' for every campaign about changing how business operates, but this risks diluting the force of the principles and claims that give BHR resonance in the first place.

Jo

These issues are the subject of a forthcoming research paper at Chatham House.  

Business and human rights: reporting and measuring

Better corporate measurement and reporting on social impact will probably promote better performance -- but not necessarily.

Many in business are overwhelmed by the proliferating plethora (had to try that...) of guidelines and reporting frameworks, standards and metrics for sustainable and responsible business.

In a previous post (here) I've noted the compliance fatigue and other problems that result from this phenomena.

In theory, firms that measure and report on their human rights or other social, environmental and governance impacts thereby also become more attuned to these in strategic and operational terms, 'mainstreaming' them into their business practices and decisions. 

(In parallel, many of these issues around social and environmental impact -- triple bottom line, non-financial due diligence, or whatever one wishes to call it -- are coming in from the periphery to the core of commercial considerations.)

However, it is not necessarily the case that more reporting, more measuring, etc., equips corporate decision-makers to be better at seeking out more socially beneficial or enviro-friendly ways of operating. Nor do they necessarily improve transparency and accountability (even if they force firms, or parts of firms, to engage with the ways in which they affect people and the planet, and give watchdogs something to audit). 

The effect of widespread uptake and implementation of reporting frameworks might be profound in shifting business cultures. But the effect is not automatic. It depends. In particular, not all firms have good feedback loops: externally-facing reporting will not necessarily change management mindsets.

Creating these frameworks, indices, matrices should not be an end in itself, therefore.

There is scope for more research on links between corporate responsibility reporting and business practices, and related frameworks for the finance sector -- whose practices hold so much influence over corporate practices in turn.

The prompt for this post is my briefing paper, published last week for Chatham House, on trends in the field of 'business and human rights'. See here.

Also published last week was the very promising first detailed guidance for corporates on reporting on efforts to implement the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. See here.

Finally, last week but one saw the publication of this brief guidance to corporates on due diligence in relation to human rights issues. See here.

All this is good, provided the business and human rights 'community' does not deceive itself that more publications, more guidelines, more frameworks will necessarily, of themselves, make the difference.

Jo

Building peace: what role for business?

What is proper and possible in engaging and influencing business in processes of building peace?

This week's post simply links to one written for the Cambridge University Press blog, relating to my book Regulating Business for Peace, just published.

The post is here.

Jo

For previous posts on this theme, see here.

Public-Private Partnerships: Hype or Hope?

Partnering with business for development is overwhelmingly a good thing.

Disciples of partnering are making fascinating progress, as The Partnering Initiative here in Oxford shows; pilgrims of partnering are forging interesting, promising relationships -- not waiting for policy orthodoxy to lead.

However, this post questions the new-found faith in public-private partnerships (PPPs).

It makes two points about the need for caution over the current enthusiasm for PPPs as the panacea for Africa's development.

1. The first is that the developmental impact of the private sector is not limited to what businesses can do in partnership with governments, civil society, and community groups.

Strategies that put 'business' and 'pro-poor development' in the same sentence should be about far more than PPPs. There are significant ways in which the developmental impact of business activity can not only be harnessed, but unleashed, without involving any partnering of the 'PPPs for development' sort.

For instance, last week's post noted the scope for responsible private enterprise to deliver poverty-reduction without partnerships as such, but with development policies geared to foster investment and broad-based, inclusive growth in societies that currently struggle to attract or achieve that.

The problem is that the current fashion for partnering, while welcome, could obscure the 'quick wins' available from, for example, helping countries reform their business regulatory environment in ways that reduce unemployment. This stuff is hard -- but not necessarily harder than PPP-ing, and potentially far more impactful in a diffuse sense across society at large.

Of course, short of partnering it makes sense to consult business (in an appropriate and principled way) in the design of policies intended to foster inclusive, sustainable growth through unleashing the private sector.

1A. This point -- PPPs are not the sole vector of increasing the private sector's development relevance -- relates to another. An emphasis on 'partnership' can be too narrow a framing for what is really about public-private cooperation more broadly: (a) 'partnering' is not limited to formal, regulated PPPs such as infrastructure ones, but encapsulates a range of relationships aimed at development impact; (b) cross-sector cooperation and dialogue, especially where systematic, can be hugely significant without involving partnering as such.

I promised a second point of caution over current prevailing PPP-related enthusiasm!

(A precursor to that is to note that the enthusiasm for PPPs and wider partnering is in fact hardly universal across either the business or development communities).

2. The PPP hype belies the experience that partnerships are hard to generate and maintain, often controversial, not necessarily efficient or effective, and not necessarily grounded in evidence of their superior developmental impact.

I say this as an overt proponent of exploring ways to engage business in the development agenda.

For the last year, I've advised on an emerging cross-sector partnership intended to promote the partnering agenda. The difficulty in getting business, government and academic actors to work together on this discussion-about-partnering is itself instructive of the challenges of partnering-in-fact. More work needs to be done on measuring the effectiveness and opportunity-cost of PPPs (widely defined), and on conceptualising their political and policy risks and implications 

In this respect, I recommend a read of this Devex Impact blog post on partnerships, especially its first few paragraphs.

Previous posts on this site have sought to reflect on these issues, for example the hype about PPPs in Africa (here).

Jo