Business and peace: the Colombia challenge

What is the role for the business community (local and foreign) in consolidating peace agreements?

This post is from Bogota, where this week saw the signing of a peace accord with the FARC rebel group following decades of civil armed conflict.

The country faces a significant and challenging history where business, human rights and conflict / security meet.

As chronicled by academics such as Angelika Rettberg, and as manifested in business-led organisations such as FIP, Colombia is no stranger to an active role for business leaders in encouraging, facilitating and indeed funding peace-making (informal and formal peace talks at the national and sub-national levels).

However, my role here this week is to talk about what next -- the peace-building phase that the agreement now heralds.

As Rettberg has noted, the Colombian private sector (and foreign investors in the mining, energy and agricultural sectors in particular) is now well sensitized to the idea of explicit business engagement in peace initiatives. Moreover, the government has taken a strong lead on issues of responsible business conduct -- for instance, Colombia is among the first countries in the world with a National Action Plan on 'Business and Human Rights' pursuant to the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on this issue.

Nevertheless (and in the shadow of the enormous legacy of this conflict more generally), a number of difficult questions remain to be addressed about how business leaders approach the challenge of making appropriate contributions to the national peace and reconciliation process.

These questions are not easily dealt with by repeating the now-fashionable SDGs rhetoric of 'business for peace' and enhanced ideas about the private sector's developmental contributions. For one thing, it is easy to exaggerate the capacity, skill, resources, and incentives for businesses to contribute explicitly to national-level peace consolidation processes, and to have over-optimistic expectations about those contributions. Such expectations assume, among other things, a very unified private sector, whereas there are significant differences in how the conflict has touched (or not touched) different sectors in this economy.

One challenge related to this differential experience seems apparent to me: how, in a country enjoying relative peace and prosperity in the last few years leading up to the peace deal, to sustain business attention to peacebuilding imperatives with long-term transformational dynamics. The economic 'peace dividend' might displace some of the urgency around attempting fundamental changes to the ways in which business here deals with social impact, security and other issues.

Here is a recent paper I did on 'the private sector and inclusive peacebuilding' (see index).

Here are some other posts on this blog on 'business and peace'.

JF   

Business and human rights: 'taking stock'

June marked 5 years since the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were endorsed by states in the UN Human Rights Council.

This short post is just to link to one recent set of reflections by others in this field on progress on the UNGPs 5 year's on -- five positives, and five areas of more concern.

Here are two selected accessible video and audio resources also 'taking stock' at this 5-year mark:

* Video by SOMO

* Podcast by John Ruggie, author of the UNGPs

These resources to not necessarily capture the range of views (from positive to critical) on the utility and impact of the UNGPs.

Jo

Here are previous posts in this blog on Business and Human Rights.

Business and human rights: hasten slowly?

Does the emerging field of business and human rights (BHR) risk developing a credibility problem?

The overall BHR challenge is in some ways the opposite of any credibility problem -- it is rather an awareness, uptake and implementation problem.

But it is arguable that from a strategic perspective, building that awareness and responsiveness to BHR issues and principles (by business and finance, as well as governments, civil society, and consumers) is best served by guarding against over-expansive claims in the name of BHR.

An Australian report this week illustrates both the potential and current limitations of efforts to promote business respect for human rights standards.

The report (here) is the latest by 'No Business in Abuse' to look at the responsibilities of a parent transnational corporation (and its creditor financial institutions) where one of its company's operations include running controversial offshore detention centres for the Australian government pursuant to that government's strategy to control irregular migration.

The report highlights the scope, faced with such issues, for advocacy actions that might influence corporate compliance with human rights standards, directly and through prompting creditors and others with commercial leverage to influence the company's conduct. The report shows how this scope exists regardless of whether one can yet be categorically clear about any binding legal obligations on companies.

But (at the risk of sounding churlish on what is important and persuasive work), the report also to me illustrates a credibility risk for BHR advocacy.

It makes two calls, the first of which is so far beyond the company's power to achieve that it undermines the force of the report. The company is called on to do something it has absolutely no legal or other power to do (release detainees into humane conditions in Australia).*

Is it petty or too provocative to say that the field of BHR will have evolved when such recommendations are more realistic?

On this note, this week's The Guardian also carried a story (here) on this company and issue and report, but also referenced a Stanford University legal opinion. I have not read it, but its claim that the company's employees may be involved in 'crimes against humanity' in these detention centers is (in legal terms) a massive over-reach. That grave international crime requires a systematic attack on a civilian population -- however bad conditions might be in those centers, the business of detention can hardly be described as an 'attack'.

Advocacy efforts need alarm bells rung, but alarmist analysis arguably does not achieve the principal aim -- to influence corporate conduct and so improve human rights protection. The company quite understandably was able reasonably to reject the Stanford analysis...

BHR advocacy needs to call out problematic business behaviours, but also offer practical and achievable alternative actions for business actors.

Jo

* I note that the recommendation goes on to suggest (as an alternative to Australian relocation), relocation to some setting with equivalent humane conditions. 

Rio Olympics 2016: Business and Human Rights

We are approaching the Games of the XXXI Olympiad in Rio de Janiero.

Global sporting events raise important business & human rights issues.

Mega sporting events involve contracting and procurement on a vast scale, along with financing, insuring and other commercial dimensions to preparing and hosting the games.

Global organisations such as the IOC (Olympics) and FIFA (football) wield considerable potential power of a positive sort in terms of how their procurement and contracting (etc.,) activities could incentivise supplier and service-provider conduct that is objectively pro-social, or at least basically human rights compliant.

John Morrison at the Institute for Human Rights and Business has led work on mega sporting events and human rights -- see this dedicated site.

For one report critical of the human rights impacts of the games, see 'The Exclusion Games' (report here, and short video here).

I found it very difficult to find, on the IOC's own site, a simple and clear statement on human rights impacts (including as to relationships with commercial partners and providers).

There is of course the IOC's famous Charter, but that is not the same thing.

On this issue, you may have seen the recent launch by FIFA of a report it commissioned by business & human rights expert John Ruggie into human rights issues in FIFA's own conduct. This of course comes ahead of the somewhat controversial football World Cup in the Gulf...

JF

Business, human rights and income inequality

What role does business have in addressing income inequality?

Does the way in which we now ask this question risk a gradual shift that wrongly pulls the focus away from its proper subject, which is the duties and policies of the regulatory state? 

How did I arrive at these remarks?

1. Very few reasonable people would dispute that income inequality (globally, and within various countries and cities) is a major issue of our time.

2. Very few business leaders would dispute the trend towards greater interest in / scrutiny of the social impact of business practices by social, consumer, market / investor and regulatory stakeholders.

Yet it is not particularly obvious, putting 1 and 2 together as issues, that one aspect of being a responsible business is to take steps to address income inequality -- a highly complex policy puzzle and socio-economic phenomenon (insofar as I understand it myself... ), one not easily fixed by simply appealing, for example, for greater bona fide corporate adherence to national taxation regimes.

At very least, is it not obvious that compliance by business with fundamental human rights standards (or even some fulsome embrace of these norms, beyond mere compliance) would necessarily have any real impact on income inequality.

Approached in terms of the legal standards that comprise the global human rights architecture, sure, there are perhaps some issues for example around wage levels that would differentiate 'employment' from 'servitude'.

I am sure that a case can be made that better performance by business actors on recognised human rights standards might materially improve (narrow) the income inequality margins.

I just do not think that case has been made yet, or properly, or fully.

At very least, I think arguments that put 'business and human rights' and 'income inequality' together are at risk of positioning human rights as some kind of magic policy fix-all, as is often the case. So that we get arguments (in effect) that if one just applied a human rights lens to climate change = fix! (see here). Or if one just looked at income inequality from a business-human rights perspective = fix!

These comments of mine are no doubt full of holes, but are prompted by the otherwise unobjectionable and agreeable remarks of a leading scholar on business and human rights in a recent post in The Conversation: here.

Academics can (and sometimes should) be advocates. Yet they can (and often should) also be nit-picking and devoted to accuracy. In this post I am probably at risk of being seen at best as overly nit-picking, or at worst as an apologist for business.

Instead my only point is the nit-picking one that it hardly seems self-evident that if more businesses ensured their operations did not violate human rights standards (as I understand these in terms of present international law), that this would affect income inequality in a meaningful way.

Income inequality matters -- no doubt. But human rights vocabularies, standards, strategies, lenses, frameworks, etc., are not necessarily the secret to addressing this endemic and worsening issue. Nor necessarily is it the role of business to address that issue, lest we let the state and policymakers off the hook (and inadvertently ascribe far greater social influence to business than is proper or prudent).

The current fashion of focusing on business's own responsibilities can sometimes have that effect. On income inequality, it is ultimately the state that matters, and while we must demand all sorts of things of 21st century business and finance, it is the state first and foremost that has the duties and powers to attempt to address the problem of income inequality.

Jo

See previous more practical, less nit-picking posts on this issue in 2014 and 2015 around the time of Davos with its focus on income inequality: here.