Private sector engagement: the new lazy?

Is there a chronic laziness among those who work on getting business more involved in pressing social issues?

Have we gone from largely neglecting the private sector as a development, peace and human rights actor (my 2015 book Regulating Business for Peace) to an opposite extreme, where one just adds 'engage business' and the agenda will take care of itself?

Moreover, in swinging to this position of often unreal, under-explored and under-theorised expectations, is there a tendency to avoid issues just when they become their most 'pointy' and practical?

What exactly is meant when we implore policymakers, civil society and others to 'engage' with business in meeting the sustainable development and corporate responsibility (etc) agenda?

The immediate prompt for this first blog for 2016 was my reaction to reviewing a draft article on engaging business in the prevention of mass atrocities. Like so many other participants in debates on the changing role and expectations of business in society, the author fell down (in my view) by glossing over things just as they become their most practical and important.

In that author's case, it was a repetitive, unhelpful and ultimately lazy tendency to exhort the private sector to 'contribute' to peacebuilding and conflict prevention -- but without spelling out what activities and approaches that might involve in practice (much less in specific contexts).

Now its all very well and good to invite constructive engagement by business actors (and encourage policymakers to facilitate this).

But what does it mean for a business to 'contribute' to the SDGs, to peace-making or peacebuilding, to human rights protection and promotion? What does it involve, what should they be doing more or less of, or do differently, with whom, and how? Where does the context matter so much that one cannot talk of 'engagement' or 'contribution' without couching it in the specifics of settings whose dynamics differ so much?

In a 2014 blog post I delivered a similar rant, suggesting (with apologies to EM Forster) that it is not enough to repeat the magic spell of 'engagement' as if by saying 'only connect' we will witness the flowering and flourishing of innovative, meaningful schemes and initiatives whereby business actors fulfil the roles now increasingly expected or hoped of them in relation to the sustainable development agenda.

That earlier rant is here.

Private sector engagement, partnerships for development etc are very hard. We seem afraid to be honest, as if merely repeating the exhortations to partner will do the trick. A less lazy approach that offers some concrete ideas rather than fluffy 'contributions' will help underpin the rhetoric with some more credible analysis -- and action.

Jo

Climate change, business and human rights

The Paris climate talks are underway. What does this mean for the 'business and human rights' field?

Does presenting climate issues as human rights issues necessarily increase the urgency, likelihood or comprehensiveness of corporate and financial activity and proactivity?

One assumption of advocacy in the BHR field is that framing the social responsibilities of business by reference to recognized, established human rights standards lends a certain urgency, persuasiveness, or imperative to businesses to act.

The assumption is that describing business conduct as having a human rights impact or potential human rights dimension brings some special galvanising force to the equation that other approaches do not.

(It is also thought that overlaying gives more virtuous businesses a stable framework of standards against which to plan their efforts to create social value and reduce negative enviro, social and governance impacts. Of course, business responsibilities are not just framed in rights terms for strategic reasons, but for reasons of principle: business activities can violate or at least impair, but also protect or enhance, various fundamental rights).

There are very sound reasons for believing that, in strategic terms, addressing the societal role and impact of business and financial activity in the lexicon and vocabulary of human rights may have some profound and positive effects.

But is it obvious and undeniable that this is so?

Are there some ways in which deploying human rights concepts and language might undermine the goal of more rights-aware, rights-based, rights-compliant business and finance?

For instance, could framing business-oriented campaigns in human rights terms sometimes lead to a defensive, litigatory mindset rather than a problem-solving, cooperative one? Could labeling something a 'Business and Human Rights' issue make some politicians and others less likely to champion it, for example in more conservative polities, than labeling something a 'responsible business issue' (the same norms still apply)?

I just do not think it is self-evident that invoking human rights on an issue necessarily makes everyone stop and say 'Oh OK, well in that case, lets all fix this!'

I do not think it is necessarily the case in relation to the nexus of business, human rights and climate change.

As the Paris talks proceed, this post simply refers to a guest blog I wrote this week where I developed these thoughts: here.

Jo

Stepping back: the private sector and the SDGs

How effective will global development targets be in securing the sustained engagement of the private sector? Are expectations of the private sector's developmental role running too high?

It is October and we are somewhat past now the UN fanfare around the long-negotiated 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to replace to 2000-2015 MDGs.

Much has been written around the SDGs, including in relation to what is portrayed as a revolutionary recognition of the private sector's role.

In view of this mountain of opinion this post has the limited ambition of querying whether this is so (game-changing scope for private sector engagement), and a related general observation querying the utility of the SDGs as ordering principles to guide development generally.

One thing to note is that the private sector is mentioned only once in the SDGs, in Target 17.17 of Goal 17, and then only in terms of formal partnerships (which are not the only way for business to up its developmental impact, or for policymakers to harness that).

The enthusiasm around the Private Sector Forum accompanying the SDGs process and summit, and the fact that there is these days a forum for business at all, can be misleading in this sense. Unreasonable expectations around the private sector's development role feature in a number of past posts on this blog (here).

Business is not about to simply 'step up' and finance pro-poor development, and to observe this is neither to criticize business nor turn away from the scope for harnessing commercial resources in support of development targets.

We do need to do more work on what incentives might exist for firms to become more explicit in partnering for development and otherwise becoming more explicit in their developmental contributions. See this recent Gaurdian event (a summary of which is out soon).

Yet those that call for business to 'step up' on the SDGs (see here, for example) must also acknowledge the huge complexity involved in all but the most well-resourced firms in trying to track SDG-related impacts. The answer is not to say 'various tools now exist to help in this'.

This relates to a second, too-late-but-anyway reflection on the SDGs.

It comes from re-reading, if you would, the sentence above 'Target 17.17 of Goal 17'. Many have commented how a key to the MDGs' relative success was their brevity and (for a very complex subject-matter) their simplicity.

The same cannot be said of the SDGs. Quite apart from poorly-resourced states, how are major firms really going to find the development agenda a compelling phenomenon with which to engage, if it has proliferated into such detail? Yes, goals need measurable targets alongside, but I wonder whether the SDGs will sustain corporate interest in sustainable development in the way they might have had their drafters' had the grace to keep things a little simpler.

I have written / ranted before on how to sustain sustainability and problems of compliance fatigue (here).

Related to regulatory and policy proliferation is the risk that SDG-related activities (by states, by firms, by civil society) become a process of tracking and compliance-style activities, rather than strategic thinking about how to promote more peaceful and prosperous societies overall.

In 2012 I wrote this post about the ordering, motivating power of simple ideas in thoroughly transforming society (here).

I am still reading all the fallout from the SDGs summit, but my own first impression is that their ambition to be comprehensive has meant a missed opportunity to present a compelling, clear, relatively simple set of ideas for a better world.

This will surely hamper the narrower objective of engaging business in meeting these goals.

Jo 

Corporates and human rights: 'knowing and showing'

The corporate responsibility movement (within and beyond firms and funds) has in recent years reflected at some length on the utility of public reporting on human rights impacts.

In an ideal and informed market, a firm's commercial value should partly depend on its social values.

How does externally-oriented reporting loop back to internal changes in strategy? How does one move socio-enviro impact issues from the periphery to the boardroom? How do those charged with improving social impact get themselves seen, on the inside, as important value-enhancers -- rather than being 'relegated' to the public relations / communications department?

Where it is not required by regulation, what is the commercial ('business case') for reporting to the public on existing or emerging human rights and social impact problems?

For many firms, there is something of a 'damned if you do / damned if you don't' dilemma here.

The obvious recent example is the reaction to Unilever's proactive approach to the human rights impacts relating to its operations and supply chains.

Unilever's CEO is a world leader in this respect. Yet not all market analysts approve of him airing, as it were, the 'dirty laundry' of adverse human rights impacts that the firm's internal processes find existing in the supply chain.

Whatever the legal-litigation and other considerations, from a corporate strategy (both brand protection / promotion, and general risk management) perspective, there is a strong argument to be made that those firms which make proactive efforts to 'know and show' the shifting map of their social (and enviro) impact are more likely to identify and pre-empt commercial and 'non-financial' risks, reinforce brand integrity, and so on.

What will it take for this strong argument to become (as Australians say) a 'no-brainer' -- beyond argument?

Achieving supply-chain integrity in social impact terms is very hard, especially for global multi-goods firms.

Firms that are honest about the complexity of these issues and display good faith efforts to address them may find customers, consumers, suppliers, investors, insurers and others far more forgiving than those which adopt, in effect, an 'ignorance is bliss' approach.

Ignorance is risk. Transparency is in -- this vague but undeniable norm of some sort, from Beijing to Brussels. Shielding is ever-harder, and a bad look.

One question is what it will take for these issues to level out such that other firms do not look at the reaction to Unilever's reporting and decide to keep their heads down. What incentive structures can shift the game so that there is only a 'damned if you don't' position?

Last week I heard John Morrison talk of the incentives (regulatory, market, consumer, corporate governance and other) required for moving these issues into the 'pre-competitive' space. That is, taking them out of play in terms of what firms see as the competitiveness downsides of greater proactivity and transparency on human rights impacts.

This blog is going through some transition as I settle into a new academic role.

A previous post reflects on these issues: here.

In the meantime, I can do no better on this topic than to promote Rachel Wilshaw's recent piece for a well-known Oxfam-related blog, on the Unilever report : see here.

Jo

Business and Human Rights: trends towards 2025

It is a decade since the UN mandate to develop what became the 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

At the inter-governmental (Geneva) level, the consensus that existed in adopting the GPs in 2011 has not held. There is some sense of a return to the polarised, partly ideological debates of the pre-2000s on how best to regulate the impact that businesses may have on human rights.

Yet what happens in Geneva is only one part of what should be a range of regulatory, educative, advocacy, capacity-building, and other measures within countries, industry sectors and supply chains. Many of these will be driven by business leaders themselves and not necessarily premised on the idea that the only 'regulation' that counts is top-down legislative action.

These issues are summarised in a March report referenced in previous blogs on this issue.

This short post (from the Australian National University, where I work now) is simply to foreshadow a coming report in September, written as part of the Chatham House programme in international law. 

This report (see launch event spiel here) will look at the next decade of the broad 'business and human rights' field, based on analysis of current trends and their likely trajectory.

Jo