In the 3rd Quarterly, we report on:

1. Insights from the Leading Wellbeing festival; video interviews
2. Processes underway to agree a human rights treaty on business; and a concerning lack of support
3. UN-published research on alternatives to microfinance; focusing on currency innovation
4. How to educate leaders for sustainability; research paper
5. Sustainable leadership spring school: Lake District & London, April 2016

1) Insights from the Leading Wellbeing festival; video interviews

Interviews on leadership for wellbeing and sustainability from are available as videos from the Network of Wellbeing. They include Charles Eisenstein, Nandita Das, Charlotte Millar, Jo Confino, Anna Zegna and Jem Bendell. They were attending an event with 200 people from 20 countries that was organised by IFLAS and Brathay. Lifeworth supported the web design and marketing. Some of the participants will reconvene in the Lake District on April 9^th for discussions, barn dance and a hike. If you want to join, please contact iflas@cumbria.ac.uk
2) Processes underway to agree a human rights treaty on business; and a concerning lack of support

In July meetings took place at the UN Human Rights Council to progress towards a new treaty on the human rights obligations of international companies. The process seeks to build upon the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” sometimes called the ‘Ruggie Framework’, and connect this to international law. In an article titled “Can CSR now support international law?” Professor Bendell looks at the response of WBCSD and others to this initiative.

3) UN-published research on alternatives to microfinance; focusing on currency innovation

At the UN summit on Financing for Development in July, the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) published a paper that explains an emerging successful alternative to microfinance. It is co-authored by Lifeworth’s Jem Bendell, with Matthew Slater and Will Ruddick. As far as we are aware, it is the first UN paper to discuss the implications of Bitcoin and currency innovation.

4) How to educate leaders for sustainability; research paper

Lifeworth’s founder Professor Bendell will present a paper on leadership for sustainability at the International Leadership Association in Barcelona in October. You can download the paper (pdf), co-authored with Richard Little from the management trainers Impact International. It is highly critical of the way many trainers and business schools teach leadership and offers a different basis.

5) Sustainable leadership spring school: Lake District & London, April 2016

The Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) is running a Sustainable Leadership Spring School in April, with a week in the beautiful Lake District and a week in London. It will also host the first intake of a new MA in Sustainable Leadership Development. Lifeworth’s Professor Bendell has co-designed and will co-tutor these courses. Click here to learn more about it.

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Just over five years ago I began working on the luxury industry.  I thought, why cant these elite brands not excel in social and environmental performance? I researched, wrote and produced the report Deeper Luxury for WWF-UK, and it triggered a bit of a furore in the fashion press and wider luxury industry (about 8000 sites now link to the report). 5 years on, I’ve helped some luxury companies with their social and environmental impacts. But I havent seen much change. Some large firms like PPR have embraced the agenda, although we wait in anticipation for more results, in terms of positive social and environmental outcomes. In the 5 years, what inspired me the most were the entrepreneurs I met. People who were creating businesses to address social and environmental problems, and targetting the luxury segment as a way to do that. I began to realise something might be in this – that these entrepreneurs might be shaping the future of luxury, and that they might be revealing a new way we can engage in social change. In the new study, I profile sustainable luxury firms Elvis and Kresse, Tesla Motors, Shokay, Source4Style, Rags2Riches, Positive Luxury, Timothy Han and Nue Luxe… It’s called “Elegant Disruption: How luxury and society can shape each-other for good”. It took about a year to write, as it involved a lot of conversations to understand just what the potential of luxury might be to influence social change. Ill be presenting it at conferences in Brisbane and Barcelona in the coming weeks.

Abstract, August 2012:

From http://www.griffith.edu.au/business-government/asia-pacific-centre-for-sustainable-enterprise/publications/working-paper-series/issue-9
This paper outlines the contemporary luxury sector, showing it is global, thriving and influential. It shows how creative destruction is typical in most industry sectors, including luxury, and how disruptive innovation by entrepreneurs is key to that process. It proposes that the current time is potentially disruptive for incumbent luxury brands and groups, due to five key trends that are beginning to re-frame the markets that luxury brands sell to. Sustainable luxury entrepreneurs from USA, UK, Philippines, India, Argentina, China and Hong Kong are profiled and described as  pursuing “elegant disruption”: a well-designed intervention in markets that both uses and affects aspirations in ways that change patterns of consumption, production or exchange, for a positive societal outcome. The paper reviews the response of mainstream luxury brands to the sustainability agenda, proposing some possible reasons why they appear to be encumbered in embracing this agenda fully. Some of the paradoxes in the notion of “sustainable luxury” are described, in order to draw implications for both the luxury industry and people interested in positive social change. The paper draws upon the authors five years of interaction with the luxury industry on sustainability issues, and is therefore written as a “first person inquiry” and draws upon principles of “appreciative inquiry” in documenting the breakthrough approaches of some sustainable luxury entrepreneurs.

There was a time when the growth of such corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards was hailed by some politicians and business leaders as evidence that governments did not need to intervene in markets for sustainable development. Yet the statistics of success do not justify such a a view, as simply inverting the numbers above, we see that worldwide 89% of timber and 94% of the wild fish catch are not certified as sustainable, while problems with deforestation and fisheries collapse are just two of many global challenges requiring international collaboration by governments.

The publication of the 2011 World Investment Report today shows that many governments have moved well beyond excuses for inaction, and are now actively leveraging private CSR standards to achieve public outcomes. This form of collaborative regulation by governments arises from the dual challenges of needing to make markets more sustainable and socially inclusive, on the one hand, and limited resources for enforcing regulations on the other. In this new policy arena, governments are using systems where businesses pay the costs of their own regulation, through certification schemes.

The UN report comes at an important time when governments are assessing what they can commit to do to promote sustainable development, at the twentieth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, coming next year in Rio De Janiero. If 1992 was about governments calling on business and civil society to work together for suatainable development, it appears that Rio 2012 may be about business and civil sociuety calling governments to join in and help to scale the approachges they have pioneered over the last 20 years.

As someone who heeded the original call of Rio to for collaborative innovation towards sustainable development, and had the privilege of working on the early phases of both the FSC and MSC, Im delighted to see this new agenda emerge. Its been a pleasure to work with UNCTAD on the CSR sections of this years World Investment Report.

Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new policy agenda on business regulation worldwide, where governments move beyond traditional hands-on or hands-off approaches to markets, and instead seek to nudge business towards more responsible and sustainable behaviours. As the UNCTAD report points out, in this new era we must remember to promote the effectiveness and accountability of any governance mechanisms. Only if these new approaches help empower those affected by trade and industry and have little voice at present, will they achieve a sustainable scaleable place in our global economy.

You can download section 3E of the World Investment Report 2011.

Professor Jem Bendell is director of Lifeworth Consulting. His last book was “The Corporate Responsibility Movement”

www.twitter.com/jembendell

One reason for the lack of comprehensive action from prestigious brands is identified as the absence of a positive vision for the ethical role of the jewellery industry. “Although a decade of effort to reduce conflict and environmental damage from jewellery supply chains has curbed some of the worst practices, it has failed to identify an aspirational role for jewellery. Today, the efforts of responsible jewellery pioneers are outlining a vision of ethical excellence,” says report co-author Dr. Jem Bendell. “By comparing the actions of ten luxury brands with this new vision, the report finds luxury jewellery firms risk being left behind in an increasingly aspirational marketplace,” he says.

The report, entitled Uplifting the Earth: the ethical performance of luxury jewellery brands, provides guidance on how brands can move beyond a negative risk management approach to their ethical considerations, and instead use social and environmental issues as a creative inspiration and collaborate to make jewellery a positive force for all involved. “More people recognise something is beautiful if it has been made beautifully, which involves all aspects of its creation. Some in the industry understand that, and need help to get buy-in from their colleagues. This report is for them,” explains report co-author Ian Doyle, of Lifeworth Consulting.

Interviews with international experts identified new brands that embody a new approach to jewellery, including CRED Jewellery, Fifi Bijoux, JEL and Brilliant Earth. Marc Choyt, of Reflective Images Inc and co-founder of Fair Jewelry Action says “The big brands must get their act together if they are not going to lose customers to the companies that really care. They can’t hide behind vague statements or the Kimberley Process any more, because others are showing what’s possible. We can make jewellery that makes a positive difference to the world.”

Uplifting the Earth follows up Professor Bendell’s study for WWF-UK called Deeper Luxury which was widely acknowledged to have inspired the luxury industry to increase efforts on social, environmental and ethical performance.

In the foreword, Maria Eugenia Giron, former CEO of Carrera y Carrera, writes that the report “is an invaluable contribution for wise, forward-thinking executives in our evolving industry.”

The brands benchmarked in the report are: Boucheron, Bulgari, Buccellati, Cartier, Chanel, Chopard, Graff Diamonds, Harry Winston, Piaget and Van Cleef & Arpels.

The report can be downloaded for free here.

A spanish version of the report can be downloaded from http://www.lujosustentable.org by clicking on “reportes”.

Questions about the report should be directed to Ian Doyle (Email: idoyle at lifeworth.com)

From “Report Unveils Ethical Excellence in Luxury Jewellery: Press release, Lifeworth Consulting and Fair Jewelry Action Geneva, June 30th 2011″

When the concept of business education, or management science, first developed, it was largely with progressive and egalitarian intentions. By outlining the skills that could be learned and mastered by anyone with the right talent and application, it challenged the assumption that future bosses would always be the sons of the former bosses. There was a meritocratic thrust, that businesses are rational enterprises that can be run by anyone with the relevant skills, from whatever social background. That original intention is not often acknowledged today, as more business schools worldwide aspire to be considered elite institutions embedded in elite social, economic and political circles. From Singapore to Sydney, people drop the names of Harvard Business School, INSEAD and others with either reverence or pride. That elitism is both an opportunity and a challenge for how they play a positive role in social progress. As educational institutions, with many charitable foundations, or government owned, or partly government funded, how they make a positive difference in society is a central question. In my ten year association with business schools I have witnessed how their efforts on social responsibility are largely focused on the content of teaching and research, or adopting some environmental measures for internal operations, rather than a full embrace of social purpose relevant for today’s challenges and applied to all organisational functions.

A responsible business school makes social progress its central purpose, through enabling students and staff to contribute significantly to that goal. It involves the integration of social, environmental and ethical considerations into the core strategy and operations of the school, and collaboration to create a supportive context for such integration to be sustainable in the long term. Aspen Institute’s ‘Beyond Grey Pinstripes’ survey and ranking has been useful in encouraging change, but it focuses only on the social, environmental and ethical content of teaching and research, rather than a broader agenda. Although the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (UNPRME) have played a useful role in internationalising the conversation amongst university staff, they do not provide a management framework for responsible business schools. It is promising, therefore, that the hosts of those principles, the United Nations Global Compact, are collaborating with the World Business School Council for Sustainable Business and The Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI) to prepare a high level report on transforming business education. To help, in a forthcoming study in the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, I identified sixteen steps for responsible business schools to take. These came from my experience of advising the Pro Vice Chancellor of Griffith Business School (GBS) on their sustainability strategy from 2007-2009, participation in related UNPRME and GRLI working groups, and insights from outside the university sector on how for-profit and not-for-profit organisations have enhanced their accountability and sustainability in recent years.

Sixteen important steps for responsible business schools are:

1) Clarify the social purpose of the institution and what it means for today’s context, and incorporate that into organisational mission and governance;
2) Upgrade existing curricula and pedagogy to incorporate the social purpose of the institution, such as teaching on social, environmental, and ethical issues;
3) Create new curricula and executive courses with content and pedagogy aligned to the social purpose of the institution;
4) Encourage the research projects of existing faculty and students to include more social, environmental and ethical themes;
5) Encourage and fund new action-oriented rather than theory-driven research;
6) Incorporate social, environmental or ethical expertise into recruitment of faculty and research students;
7) Upgrade admissions procedures, fee structures, scholarships, advertising and outreach, to improve diversity of students and their ability to do progressive work upon graduating;
8 ) Support students and alumni to organise to promote learning and action on social, environmental or ethical issues;
9) Incorporate consideration of social, environmental, and ethical issues into the operations of the organisation (i.e. practices at work), including core issues such as executive compensation or student welfare;
10) Encourage an organisational learning environment by requiring departments put forward academics to lead internal staff training on the social, environmental or ethical dimensions of the organisational functions they are experts in;
11) Host events and produce newsworthy reports or papers that stimulate public and professional discussion on social, environmental and ethical issues;
12) Encourage and support staff to engage helpfully with issues affecting the local community, using their particular talents, either as volunteers or in their work for the school;
13) Seek and support collaboration outside the organisation to align external factors such as institution and staff rankings, accreditations, awards, and funding, as well market demand, with these steps;
14) Develop policies and procedures for private donations or consulting fees to be received transparently and in-line with the mission of the organisation and without threatening the success of the organisation’s other activities;
15) Align incentives within the organisation with all these steps, including reducing perverse incentives;
16) Communicate internally and externally on implementation of these steps, using (and perhaps developing) relevant benchmarks, as well as providing mechanisms for stakeholder feedback on progress.

These steps cover those areas of activity that have important lasting effects on the social role of business schools. I have seen some of the steps taken at different business schools, but not yet all of the steps taken at one.

Given the elitism in the business school sector, their responses to social inequality have been particularly problematic, with public rows in both the UK and France in recent years. A business school’s response to social inequality, and to finding a progressive role in social mobility, is a litmus test for whether a school see corporate responsibility and sustainability as, on the one hand, a new management fad, teaching product, or marketing opportunity, or on the other, an aspect of the very purpose of the school. With that in mind, for the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, with my colleague Ian Doyle at Lifeworth Consulting, we looked for innovations on social mobility from business schools worldwide.

In France, one business school that has been actively trying to address social justice issues is Bordeaux Management School (BEM). A member of GRLI, BEM claims to be the first French business school to integrate civic service into its management courses. It has a partnership with UNIS-CITE, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting the development of civil society in France, with specific goals to encourage citizen responsibility and engagement, fight against exclusion to reinforce social cohesion and mobilise youth on social and environmental issues. The partnership allows students to participate in the management of a civic project for 6-9 months on territorial and social development and is an integral part of curriculum. Not only does the programme try to apply management education to social issues, it also allows students to have a more systemic view of society in working with local authorities.

BEM has also recognised that access to business schools needs to go further than scholarships for those students that show potential. As part of democratising access to the school, since 2006 it has partnerships with two local high schools whereby university undergraduates tutor socially or geographically under-privileged students in the schools. The goal is to support and provide guidance in terms of pupils’ professional ambitions, and the direction necessary to access to higher education courses whilst removing some of the socio-cultural barriers that impede such access. As well as providing financial access to BEM through a solidarity fund and thus better access to opportunities, the personalised nature of the process means that it is adapted to the needs of student in question, thus trying to address other inequality barriers that may impact upon the life of the student.

Another member of the GRLI is the Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research in India, whose leadership programme, Project Netrutva, aims to provide social-economic empowerment to under-privileged individuals through management education. By integrating disadvantaged students that were unable to complete their school education into a management course at Welingkar, such students are encouraged to complete their higher learning, potentially enabling greater social mobility and professional development.

To facilitate the process, the school needed to think about the practical aspects of incorporating students with lower educational qualifications into the programme. A first step was to pay the selected students a stipend to replace any lost income so that they could focus on their studies. Another step was to reduce the knowledge divide between the students that had passed through the usual entry criteria. Rather than marginalising the disadvantaged students, Welingkar inaugurated a participative approach to the programme so that peers take responsibility for the development of the students needing to catch-up.

Perhaps the leading social innovation in university education comes from South Africa. The Community Individual Development Association (CIDA) University in Johannesburg aims to provide education in business administration for the rural poor with a view to transform its students into leaders of their communities in turn advancing the socio-economic transformation of the country and the broader region. To do this, it focuses on four building blocks: being holistically centred, by going beyond the technical competencies related to business; low-cost; relevant to the different segments of society including business and government; and encouraging student resourcefulness to study. The school recognises the challenging backgrounds of students including former street-kids, students from geographically isolated areas, orphans and students whose parents have criminal records, and has put in place a life skills certificate as a part of the programme.

These schools are expanding the notion of merit so that it is measured according to one’s contribution to society, rather than one’s place in it.

For more universities and business schools to act on this social agenda in a comprehensive fashion will require reconsidering some core operations and system conditions. Two key issues are school finances and school rankings. Heads of business schools have warned of the financial challenge posed by a lack of endowments and reductions in government funding, due to fiscal tightening. They say this is leading them to raise fees, which will not help them in their social role. However, one answer lies close to home – their own salaries. A New York Times article highlighted how university chancellor compensation is starting to resemble the trends in corporate executive pay. Ms Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty and staff union for the City University of New York CUNY has stated, ‘Lavish salaries for top management are unfortunately standard in American higher education…But what’s also standard is underfinancing of the core activity of the university, which is instruction. The gap between the chancellor’s salary [and that of lecturers] , or the standard of living of many of our students and their families, is huge.’ A report by the Guardian newspaper illustrated a similar trend in the United Kingdom where some vice-chancellors had seen their annual earnings double or even triple over the last decade compared with a 45.7% rise for the same period for average higher education teaching professionals. Unless senior executives in business schools curb their pay, then expressions of commitment to social inclusion, or explanations for raising fees in the name of quality, may seem superficial.

Business school heads also need to collectively call for a change in the way rankings are produced. Currently one of the key indicators of the success of a business school is the students’ salary upon leaving the institution. If this remains, then initiatives such as encouraging graduates into social enterprise or public service, will always remain marginal. Ranking systems need to measure the social utility of projects and careers, rather than equating success with monetary worth. Although the rankings assume salary to be a key interest of prospective students, it could be that the status of the business school i.e. its ranking, is of key interest, and thus the rankings have the opportunity to encourage not thwart the social purpose of business schools

The challenge of transforming management education is at the same time highly systemic, broadly institutional, and deeply personal. Prestigious universities may be able to attract millions from donors for chairs and centres in social enterprise or inclusive business, yet our brief review found that the real innovations in education are occurring amongst people to whom the struggle and creativity of social change is a lived experience, not just a topic of study. Humility and exchange are the parents of new insight. Herein lies perhaps the greatest challenge for elite institutions – to overcome the pride of a high status, or the fear of losing such status. Only then will they authentically embrace a public purpose and take risks to lead, rather than just reacting to public pressure or government legislation. As Mark Drewell, Chief Executive of the GRLI Foundation, explained: “It is about moving from being the best in the world to an era where business success is predicated on being the best for the world.”

This blog is based on research for a forthcoming article in issue 41 of the Journal of Corporate Citzenship (Doyle, Visser and Bendell (2011). References can be found in that article. Jem Bendell is an Adjunct Associate Professor with GBS, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at IE Business School. Http://www.twitter.com/jembendell

Our proposal responds to the growing efforts to review the developmental impacts of core business operations. The term ‘Inclusive business’ describes the belief that business can have a greater positive impact on development by adapting their core business to encourage development outcomes, rather than through corporate philanthropy, or new base of the pyramid initiatives that target the poor as consumers, or support for social enterprises. [1] ‘Inclusive Business’ is defined by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as ‘business models that create value by providing products and services to or sourcing from the poor, including the earned income strategies of non-governmental organisations.’[2] The focus is less on small enterprises seeking to address social needs profitably, but large firms being able to adjust their core businesses to benefit more people as either consumer, employee, or supplier.

A report in April 2010 by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) entitled ‘Scaling Up Inclusive Business’ marked a watershed in the discussion of business contributions to development, as it uncovered some myths and mapped out a new agenda.[3] First, they found that most companies that  engage in more inclusive business practices do not do it for reputation, risk management or innovation promotion. Those traditional drivers of voluntary responsibility are not sufficient to make a real difference to investment strategy. Instead there has to be an obvious model for sales growth for companies to invest significantly in including more people in the sphere of their positive impact.

Second, they did not find any success from specialist base of the pyramid approaches, but a “whole pyramid approach.” Beth Jenkins and her co-authors explained that: “most of the commercially viable, scalable examples… take more of a “whole pyramid” approach in which the poor are segments within a much broader overall market, supplier base, or distribution network… Cemar, for example, was required by law to electrify the entire state of Maranhão in Brazil’s low-income northeast region. The company was permitted to charge higher-income, higher-usage customers higher tariffs – enabling it to cross-subsidize those with low requirements and abilities to pay, with the government providing additional subsidies.

Their third key finding is the essential role of governments in creating enabling conditions and even imperatives for inclusive business. One of the most successful examples in the report was from the Philippines, and the often highly charged issue of private provision of water services. The report highlighted how the Manila Water Company is effectively providing water for impoverished communities due to the company and the government planning to ensure the successful meeting of public need and private expectations. Through a series of partnerships between the company, municipal governments and local communities, low-income neighbourhoods not only have access to water but are themselves central to the efficiency and cost-savings components of Manila Water’s inclusive business model. The resulting benefit to the community is superior service and water quality while actively participating in keeping the costs of water low.[4] In many countries the private provision of water by large corporations has created criticism and even protest. Perhaps one of the most important means of ensuring that the costs have been kept down and thus maintained Manila Water’s licence to operate is that the government required the company to cross-subsidise, so that they charge wealthier consumers more in order to fund the infrastructure for poorer consumers. This suggests a key government role to encourage some forms of inclusive business, including through regulations that require inclusive practices in return for licences.5

A fourth finding was the general lack of good examples of inclusive business by large firms. “Large-scale success stories – reaching large numbers of poor people directly or via replication – are still the exception, not the rule,” wrote Beth Jenkins and her co-authors.6 Given the companies in their investment portfolio are receiving funds from a development-oriented institution one might assume some examples of inclusive business, yet only about 100 were found to have a potential inclusive business dimension, in addition to about 100 micro-finance initiatives. That is roughly 13% of the IFC investment portfolio.[7]

The fifth finding, and main purpose of their report, is the need for greater collaboration on enabling conditions for inclusive business, if they are to be mainstreamed beyond the current low level. For this purpose, more collective action is called for on issues such the dual evaluation of business activities, the development of in-depth market information on the needs, aspirations, capabilities, and limitations of low-income consumers and producers, as well as on awareness-raising, education, and training for low-income consumers, suppliers, distributors, and retailers. In a seminar on this topic co-hosted by IFC and Harvard University, participants described a need for “greater transparency [from potential donors to inclusive business projects] about what is possible and on what terms; faster decision-making and execution; and more judicious, strategic communication with external parties and the public at large.”[8]

In the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, we argue that donors will need to become clearer about what kinds of projects are worthy of support and what management systems need to be in place to promote success. Some donors have measurement systems, such as the IFC’s own “Development Outcome Tracking System”, however such systems do not yet include the social and environmental standards that are already agreed by the wider international community as important aspects of sustainable development. Other goals, such as the MDGs, and standards, such as the ILO conventions, were not designed for business directly, while the UNGC only provides generic principles that are not comprehensive (not including health, for instance). Attempts to make broad goals such as the MDGs relevant to companies by using them as the basis for measurement tools, as with the MDGscan.org, are useful for bringing attention to core business contributions to development, but they do not assess the full impact of business. For instance, the data on employment creation does not distinguish between a decent job and forced labour. Standards such as the ISO 26000 social responsibility standard, which was published in November 2010, will prove useful, but as it focuses mostly on reducing negative impacts of business practice, it will not be sufficient for guiding inclusive business and social enterprise, where the intention is to generate positive impacts in specific ways.

Therefore we argue in the Journal of Corporate Citizenship that it is time now for a more holistic and integrated approach to business contributions to development and their measurement – a form of “sustainable inclusive business”. We suggest a management system could be developed to improve large companies’ contributions to development. To help with that process, in the article we identify the important personal qualities of managers (Box 1) and the characteristics of business projects (Box 2) that we have identified enable beneficial engagements by large enterprises in low income communities. We think that these qualities and characteristics should be sought in any potential recipients of funds for sustainable inclusive business projects, to ensure that such projects do help their intended beneficiaries in an effective, efficient and sustainable way.

Box 1: Personal Qualities of Managers of Sustainable Inclusive Business

There are key personal qualities that are important for business executives in large corporations to move their organisation towards helping poverty reduction in a sustainable way:
1) Active: aspiring to be a conscious agent of sustainable development in ways that involve core business
2) Coherent: addressing both the positive and negative impacts on low income communities of current and planned business activities, leaving no issue ignored for long
3) Self-aware: focusing on your new USP – your ‘Unique Serving Points’ – by identifying the special capabilities you bring to a particular situation
4) Transformative: seeking enterprise opportunities that disrupt obstacles to social progress.
5) Creative: using methods and indicators that promote creative team-working to innovate new solutions
6) Inquiring: learning together with unusual colleagues, sharing your own approaches while appreciating low income communities and their organisations as co-innovators, while increasing your understanding of the complexity of development issues (including by applying the project characteristics ).

Box 2: Project Characteristics of Sustainable Inclusive Business Initiatives

A particular business project should have the following characteristics in order make a positive contribution to sustainable development. Projects that do not exhibit these characteristics may create some benefit, but risk causing new problems in the communities they affect, and therefore having unintended negative consequences for both sustainable development and the performance and reputation of the organisations involved:
1) Provides products, services or decent work to lower-income communities in ways that stimulate more sustainable production and consumption patterns as a whole
2) If out-competing goods and services produced by locally-owned operations, then offers superior eco-social qualities to existing options, and provides local employment
3) Supports a mixed-ownership economy
4) Provides new sources of capital to community members
5) Provides community members with new access to markets, on stable and transparent terms
6) Transfers appropriate technology and skills to community members
7) Generates a return on investment that is acceptable to the company to be part of a scalable business, without future reliance on cash or in-kind subsidy from government or voluntary sector partners
8 ) Supports good governance and enabling conditions in the local community and nationally, in accordance with relevant UN principles on human rights and development
9) Involves mechanisms for participatory monitoring, evaluation and learning that address each of the preceding characteristics, to inform future strategy and operations.

The references are available in the full article in the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, in the ‘World Review’ of Issue 39. To reference this source, use the following: Bendell, J, Doyle, I and T. Sarker (2010) World Review, Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Issue 39, Greenleaf Publishing, UK.

For the study, Lifeworth Consulting analysed the reports classified as A+ by the Global Reporting Initiative in 2009. They found only 3% of the world’s best corporate responsibility reports that were searchable online mentioned the problem of economic inequality.

Hanniah Tariq

None were found to explain the specific problems of economic inequality, in terms of its impacts on issues such as well-being, security, and the environment. The companies that were found to cite some work on economic inequality are Abeinsa, Banco Bradesco, Caja de Burgos, Caja Navarres, Larsen & Toubro, Otto Group, Telefonica S.A., and The Co-operative Group. “The study argues that economic inequality will become increasingly important in future, as both its extent and awareness of its wider impacts grows,” explains Lifeworth Associate Hanniah Tariq, a co-author of the study.

Although the study explains how this agenda poses difficult challenges for large for-profit corporations, it points to some ways for companies to voluntarily begin to address this issue, including:

• reducing wage differentials and encouraging that from suppliers and other business partners
• promoting working arrangements that enable the less economically advantaged to participate more gainfully in a firm
• developing new ownership forms that involve staff and consumers, and favouring certain forms of ownership structure in their business partners
• seeking more independent locally run businesses to purchase from and work with
• avoiding lobbying against policies that are aimed at reducing economic inequality
• incorporating measurement of project impacts on economic inequality into social performance metrics

The study summarises evidence from leading sociologist, economists, political scientists and authoritative bodies such as the UN, that link economic inequality with the levels of environmental degradation, crime, conflict, physical and mental illness, and poverty. Published in a leading academic journal on corporate responsibility, it was written before David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School was reported in the New York Times this year as having found a correlation between economic inequality and financial instability.

Dr. Jem Bendell

The study argues that one of the reasons that economic inequality has not been addressed yet by voluntary corporate responsibility initiatives is that the issue has not often been raised by civil society and the media. “The mainstream development community of intergovernmental agencies, government aid agencies, large foundations and Western NGOs have been rather quiet on the issue of economic inequality in the past decades. For instance, it does not feature well in the Millennium Development Goals. This has meant people in business and finance may have missed economic inequality, not only as a key public problem, but one with real commercial and investment implications, not only in the global South but in advanced economies as well,” argues lead author of the study, Dr Jem Bendell, an Associate Professor with Griffith Business School.

In addition, the authors recognise that on first glance the issue appears too difficult for voluntary corporate engagement. But rather than dismiss it with arguments that economic inequality is inevitable or useful, study co-author and Lifeworth Associate Ian Doyle explains that “the first step to any decent engagement with this issue is to understand the problem better – the impact of economic inequality on society as a whole, and the potential impacts on business success.”

Ian Doyle

The study describes successful companies that have alternative forms of ownership that do not add significantly to economic inequality, such as The John Lewis Partnership (JLP), Organic Valley, Carris Companies and Coopaname. It also discusses the experience with attempts by governments to pluralise ownership of companies, such as the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act of 2003 (BBBEE) in South Africa.

The study argues there are implications from an economic inequality agenda for the social enterprise and social innovation community. None of the metrics for social impact that the study authors were able to review currently examine how the ownership of the organisations involved in a particular activity then affects economic inequality. “The agenda on social enterprise, promoted by Schwab Foundation, Acumen Fund, among others, has tended to make little or no distinction between organisations on the grounds of their ownership. Given an awareness of the downsides of economic inequality, rather than poverty alone, this approach will not be tenable in future,” explains Dr Bendell.

For responsible investment, an awareness of the societal and long term financial harm of high economic inequality could necessitate a new reflection on what responsible investors seek from companies and what that means for their own ownership stakes and rights. However, some of the implications of the problem of economic inequality are beyond the arena of voluntary corporate responsibility, says Dr Jem Bendell: “Policy makers need to recognise a firm’s impact on economic inequality as an aspect of its social responsibility, and start to distinguish more clearly between different forms of ownership, as part of their effort to promote a sustainable and socially beneficial enterprise economy,” he explains.

The study appears in the ‘World Review’ of Issue 38 of The Journal of Corporate Citizenship. The study can be purchased from http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/jcc38.  The c0-authors are Jem Bendell, Hanniah Tariq, Ian Doyle and Janna Greve. Lifeworth Consulting prepared the study as part of the its Enterprise Trends programme, which involves producing quarterly and annual studies of global trends in corporate responsibility. Lifeworth Consulting is a network of associates in nine countries who provide research, strategy, training and liaison for organisations seeking innovative ways of promoting sustainable development through enterprise. http://www.lifeworth.com/consult

The review examines the policies and reports of the world’s 100 largest Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and 100 largest institutional investors, on matters of social and environmental management. It finds that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Responsible Investment (RI) activities are now so widespread that they could affect trade and investment flows, yet they differ greatly in their content and scope, so their impact on sustainable development is currently unclear. Lifeworth’s Director Jem Bendell, the co-editor of the report, explains that “the data shows that both corporate reporting and investor engagement on business responsibilities is now widespread around the world yet remains very variable in both form and quality.” An Associate Professor with the Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise at Griffith Business School, Dr Bendell believes “there is a now a need for more guidance in the public interest, involving further dialogue with and between governments. Private policies on sustainable development are becoming such a feature of international trade and investment we need to bring governments to the table and work out what standards and policies will work best for all and then how we can promote them.”

Given the growth and consolidation in environmental, social and governance (ESG) analyst firms in the past 12 months, combined with perplexingly high ratings of BP by many ESG analysts over previous years, the report is likely to add weight to calls from some quarters for CSR reports and ESG ratings to become more accurate assessments of the actual social and environmental performance of companies. As such, it will provide added impetus for efforts within the UN and civil society to raise the standard and relevance of reporting and ratings, for all stakeholders. Within the UN, the Intergovernmental Working Group of Experts on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting (ISAR) could play a stronger role in promoting standardisation. In civil society, the nascent Global Initiative for Sustainability Rankings (GISR) can complement existing frameworks from the Global Reporting Initiative. There is already growing support from within the CSR and RI professions for more transparency and clarity in communications and ratings. Mark Tulay, former head of ESG Solutions at RiskMetrics told Responsible Investor magazine ‘We believe it is time for an independent, non-commercial initiative… to chart a longer term strategy for building a world-class, normative ratings framework to guide capital, procurement and business-NGO partnerships toward companies that are true sustainability leaders.”

The UNCTAD report incorporates data prepared by EIRIS (United Kingdom), Griffith Business School (Australia) and Ernst & Young (Netherlands). In the downloadable summary of the review, UNCTAD’s Economic Affairs Officer, Dr Miller highlights the following findings:
(a) Private policy on a large enough scale can have an impact similar to or greater than public policy. As a result, CSR has emerged as an important area of soft law self-regulation (or “soft-regulation”). CSR can present policymakers with new options and tools for addressing key development challenges.
(b) Most large TNCs now recognize the importance of CSR yet the standard of communication varies widely. There is a role for policymakers to enhance the quality of communications. Various policy options exist such as supporting the harmonization of CSR reporting, and mandating such standardized reporting through stock exchange listing requirements.
(c) Responsible investment practices (efforts by investors to incorporate ESG issues into investment decisions and to engage with investee companies to encourage ESG practices) have become common features of the world’s 100 largest pension funds. Regulators can work to strengthen the mechanisms through which institutional shareholders are able to influence the ESG practices of the companies in which they invest, while also encouraging investors to formally
articulate their stance on ESG issues in public reports.
(d) At least basic climate change-related information is now reported by most large TNCs. However significant inconsistencies and inadequacies among company reports undermine the comparability and usefulness of this information. Unless reporting is produced in a consistent and comparable manner, it is difficult for policymakers, investors and other stakeholders to use it to make informed decisions. Policymakers could promote an internationally harmonized approach to the way companies explain, calculate and define climate change-related emissions.
(e) A number of voluntary initiatives are taking a leading role in designing and facilitating CSR and responsible investment instruments, encouraging improved corporate communication on ESG issues and creating important benchmarks, based on universally agreed principles. Policymakers can become involved in these initiatives with the aims of promoting sustainable
development goals and identifying useful tools to complement government rules.

The report and its summary can be downloaded at www.unctad.org/csr

Lifeworth Consulting participated in this work as part of its Enterprise Trends programme. Lifeworth’s Jem Bendell can be contacted for interview about the report and the challenges it identifies, via +44(0)2071936102

Reflections from Professor Andrew Crane, along with information on a new journal on the pitfalls and future of partnering that is co-edited by Jem Bendell (the editor of Terms for Endearment), is available online. Terms for Endearment is half price until the end of this anniversary year. Bendell’s new book on transformative partnering will be published later this year.

Peter Newell: Reflections on “Globalisation and the new politics of sustainable development”

When I wrote my contribution for the book Terms of Endearment I was working as a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University and interested in how globalisation in all its forms impacted upon our collective ability to meet the challenges of sustainable development. This basic concern continues to underpin my work on the role of business and markets in environmental governance and particularly the ways in which this can be made to work for the benefit of poorer and excluded groups.

For me this book in many ways captured a particular moment around the late 1990s in which NGOs and TNCs were encountering one another in novel and innovative ways through collaboration and engagement as well as conflict and protest around issues of social and environmental responsibility in a global(ising) economy. While the novelty of the encounter is no longer there for many companies or civil society groups, the agenda of civil regulation and corporate social and environmental responsibility has evolved in a series of interesting directions which have brought with them new challenges. Despite the critiques and cynicism regarding the worth or CSR measures, many of them valid, they continue to proliferate and develop in new sectors and areas of the world going well beyond ‘do no harm’ to tackling complex development issues such as corruption and mineral extraction. As they have done so the boundaries between the responsibilities of states and corporations in particular have become very blurred especially in the many parts of the world where state capacity is weak or effectively not existent. Together with other colleagues I have explored the challenges of what CSR can and cannot do for development in special issues of the journal International Affairs (2005) Third World Quarterly (2007) and Development and Change (2008).

The depth and reach of CSR now has to address new geo-political and economic realities to do with the rise of countries with relatively recent or weak traditions of CSR such as China and India, whose firms compete with many European and North American firms that have taken on board the importance of CSR, but where many of the drivers of CSR (threat of regulation, shareholder activism, civil society pressure are less apparent). It also has to deal with the reality that that the very basis on which growth is fuelled (literally) has to change if we are to address climate change effectively. Simply put, business as usual cannot be sustained. Climate change an issue which has shot up the agenda of many companies, initially as threat but increasingly also for many as an opportunity to meet rising demand for low-carbon goods and services. But determining, calculating and allocating responsibility in a highly inter-dependent, yet highly unequal, global economy presents a challenge of staggering proportions. These issues have been explored in recent books on Governing Climate Change and Climate Capitalism.

Since writing my contribution to Terms of Endearment I have looked into the role of businesses as political actors in relation to specific issues such as crop biotechnologies and climate change, looked at their CSR activities in country-settings such as India and Argentina and sought to move the debate from one about discretional responsibility to one about accountability and the nature of the social contract between state, market and civil society. I have worked with many different businesses, NGOs, international institutions and research organisations in relation to specific aspects of these issues. My current job as Professor of International Development at the University of East Anglia and membership of the board of trustees at the One World Trust allows me to work with such an interesting range of actors in this field. But I continue to be driven by an underlying interest in whether, how and when markets can be made to address poverty alleviation and environmental degradation which defines my research, teaching and advocacy. For me this basic concern will determine whether collectively we can respond to ‘wicked’ problems such as hunger, poverty and environmental degradation. Let’s hope that in another ten years we have made more progress than in the last ten years since the book was published.

Read Peter’s chapter for free at: http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/content/pdfs/terms_newell.pdf

Steve Waddell: Reflections on “Complementary resources: the win-win rationale for partnership with NGOs”

The original piece was the product of an intense period of questioning about the legitimacy and value of distinguishing between business, government and civil society. Why three sectors, and not four? Where do they come from? Are they global, or a product of just Western or industrial/post-industrial economies? What opportunities might they present, if their core competencies are truly distinctive and well understood? How can they work together to respond to the deep change challenges represented by sustainability insights? I was fortunate to have received substantial funding to carry out these investigations globally.

The end of this period of work in terms of publishing came in 2005 with my book Societal Learning and Change. The meta-level learning is represented by the Societal Learning and Change matrix. One of its implications is that societal-level change requires engagement across the sectors. And it requires change in individuals, organizations, the sectors themselves and the three key systems of society.

The Societal Learning and Change Matrix

Societal – Political Systems – Economic Systems – Social Systems
Sectoral – The State Sector – The Market Sector – The Social Sector
Organizational – Government agencies – Businesses – Community-based Orgs.
Individual – Mentally centered – Physically centered – Emotionally centered

One key insight came from work by Sandra Seagal (Human Dynamics) and many educators who classify individuals as being dominantly one of three types of learners:
- The mentally-centered learners deal with abstractions and concepts (like the Table!); they tend to dominate government organizations which are charged with developing laws and enforcing them by deciding whether people are acting inside or outside of “the rules”.
- The physically-centered learners (kinesthetic) learn by seeing, touching and feeling – they are the “seeing-is-believing” people who tend to dominate business which focuses on physical, quantifiable outcomes.
- The emotionally-centered learners are those who know reality when they feel it in their hearts, and when they are emotionally moved. These people tend to dominate community-based organizations that work on issues of justice, culture and long-term sustainability.

This means that the differences between business, government and civil society arise from inherent differences in individuals, and the way they make sense of the world and learn. Therefore embracing diversity should include embracing these different ways of making sense of the world. Change strategies must respond to these different ways of making sense.

The end of this period in terms of my work came in 2000, when I made a modest contribution to a report to Kofi Annan titled Critical Choices: The United Nations, networks, and the future of global governance. This led me to the past decade of work with global multi-stakeholder change networks I call Global Action Networks (GANs). This period of work is being summarized in a book coming out the fall of 2010 titled Global Action Networks: Creating our future together. These GANs represent a major organizational innovation, as different from the three sectors as they are from each other. They include the Forest Stewardship Council, Transparency International and the Global Compact. They are forming an increasingly dense network of global, cross-sector and cross-issue connections. This web of business, government and civil society organizations is perhaps our best hope for addressing the profound challenges facing our planet, and creating a wealthy, just and sustainable future.

Read Steve’s chapter for free at: http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/content/pdfs/terms_waddell.pdf

Saleem H Ali: Reflections on Shades of green: mining, NGOs and the pursuit of negotiating power

A decade ago when I wrote my contribution for Jem Bendell’s edited volume “Terms of Endearment,” I was a doctoral student at MIT and just beginning to delve into research on environmental resistance movements to mining development. The tenuous relationships between NGOs, Businesses and Government were beginning to be studied by social scientists and Bendell’s volume was among the earliest to consider the topic from an integrative management perspective. Much has changed since the publication of the book. Large environmental NGOs have become far more willing to embrace corporate partnerships and this has led to some fractures within civil society. Smaller and more politically strident NGOs are critiquing the big players of “selling out” and being accomplices in “greenwash.” Indigenous identity, which was the topic of my chapter in the volume, has acquired greater salience since the establishment of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous People, and national apology resolutions to Aboriginal peoples in Australia and the United States. Indeed, the fracturing of environmental narratives along indigenous rights versus environmental conservation have become more acute.

Reevaluating the partnerships between NGOs and the business community in these troubled times is urgently needed. Businesses and NGOs need to assess their “Terms of Endearment” with a retrospective that considers the shortcomings of the relationship between the private sector and civil society. Moving from positional idealism to principled pragmatism is essential in this regard. Novel transnational accountability systems, such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) are beginning to emerge and deserve our attention for further study and reflection. New forms of civil society organizations such as the Publis What You Pay Coalition and the Revenue Watch Institute are coupling their efforts with such para-governmental and industry-led efforts. The success of such collaborations will depend on going back to some of the fundamental lessons in “Terms of Endearment.”

Read Saleem’s chapter for free at: http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/content/pdfs/terms_ali.pdf

Other Free Sections from the Book:

Foreword, Anita Roddick, then Founder and Co-Chair, The Body Shop International; Founder, New Academy of Business, UK
Foreword, Georg Kell, then Senior Officer, Executive Office of the United Nations Secretary-General.
Foreword, Kumi Naidoo, then President, CIVICUS
Introduction: Working with stakeholder pressure for sustainable development, Jem Bendell, Director, Lifeworth and Lifeworth Consulting, and Associate Professor, Griffith Business School.

Biographies of the contributors:

Peter Newell, Professor of International Development. Peter is an academic, consultant, teacher and activist working on the politics of environment and development. He has previously worked at Friends of the Earth, Climate Network Europe and for academic institutions in the UK and Argentina including Oxford, Warwick and Sussex universities and FLACSO Argentina. He is currently Professor of International Development at the University of East Anglia and in 2008 was awarded an ESRC Climate Change Leadership Fellow to work on The Governance of Clean Development (www.clean-development.com). His work on CSR and corporate accountability has been published in journals such as Development and Change, Third World Quarterly and International Affairs. On climate change he has conducted research and policy work for the governments of the UK, Sweden and Finland as well as international organisations such as UNDP and GEF. His books include Climate for Change: Non State Actors and the Global Politics of the Greenhouse (CUP, 2000) The Business of Global Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2005) Rights, Resources and the Politics of Accountability (Zed Books, 2006) Climate Capitalism (CUP, 2010) and Governing Climate Change (Routledge, 2010).

Steve Waddell, Principal, Networking Action. Responding to the 21st century’s enormous global challenges and its unsurpassed opportunities require new ways of acting and organizing. Through NetworkingAction I respond to these opportunities with consulting, education, research, and personal leadership. I focus upon business-government-civil society collaborations to produce innovation, enhance impact, and build new capacity. This may be local, national and/or global; the issue arenas are varied. I have done this for more than 20 years. Two key concepts are associated with my work: “societal learning and change,” which is a deep change strategy to address chronic and complex issues; and Global Action Networks (GANs), which are an emerging form of global governance that addresses issues requiring deep change. I have many publications, including the book Societal Learning and Change: Innovation with Multi-Stakeholder Strategies (2005); another book, Networking Action: Organizing for the 21st Century, is in development. I have a Ph.D. in sociology and an MBA.

Saleem H. Ali is associate professor of environmental planning at the University of Vermont (USA) and the author most recently of “Treasures of the Earth; Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future.” (Yale University Press, 2009). http://www.treasurebook.info

Sean was working on CSR at Gap Inc. when he picked up my book “Terms for Endearment”, 10 years ago. Back then partnerships between businesses, NGOs and others to promote responsible business and sustainable development were rather novel arrangements. Today they are commonplace, worldwide. As such, it is important for more professional rigour to be brought to their management and analysis. That is the inspiration behind our “Engaging Change” work programme at Lifeworth Consulting, and to that end, we’re making existing materials more widely available, and sharing new research on partnering today.

First up, to mark the anniversary, the publisher Greenleaf is offering a big discount on “Terms for Endearment” (50% off), and making a number of the chapters free to download. “The book itself was a great collection of articles and it really helped kick start a critical perspective on partnerships and an engagement from the academic community with the political ramifications of corporate responsibility practice” explain Professors Andy Crane and Dirk Matten on their blog. It is fascinating to see where the contributors, clearly on the cutting edge of their work as to be focused on this issue at the time, have subsequently progressed. George Kell, soon to become head of the new UN Global Compact, and Kumi Naidoo, now head of Greenpeace International, wrote forewords. So I asked a few contributors to reflect on their chapters and what they have learned since. To begin, Andy Crane’s reflections follow below. Reflections from other contributors will be shared next week, including Peter Newell, Steve Waddell and Saleem Ali.

Second, we have new research to share this month, published in the leading journal ‘Business Strategy and the Environment’. As any field of practice grows, so orthodoxies emerge. That is the case with cross-sector partnering, and a new orthodoxy in both practice and research could stifle critical thinking and real progress on the ground. With my co-editors Eva Collins and Juliet Roper, we call this “partnerism”, an assumption that partnership is always useful in creating change, and that struggle and conflict are unhelpful. Contributors to the volume look at experiences of partnership from across the Asia-Pacific, and bring new insights into what really drives partnerships and what the future holds. In Terms for Endearment contributors placed partnerships in the context of power relations between sectors and the need for more accountability. In the special issue we maintain that view of partnerships in context – as a useful methodology, not ideology.

I hope the materials are of some use, whether you’re a manager or academic.
Jem Bendell

Reflections from Professor Andrew Crane, author of the chapter, “Culture clash and mediation: exploring the cultural dynamics of business-NGO collaboration”, in Terms for Endearment

“If truth be told, I discovered business-NGO partnerships pretty much by accident. I was trying to complete my PhD, which was about the “amoralization” of corporate greening. That is, how business involvement in sustainability was accompanied by some form of removal of moral framing and content. I’m not just talking the business case, though that was certainly a major part of it. But also how even social mission companies sometimes failed to morally engage their employees in green business. Or how middle managers in companies would try to make environmental issues as normal and unthreatening to their colleagues as possible. “The environment” my respondents basically seemed to be telling me, was “not ethics”.

I ran into the WWF Plus Group, which is the partnership that I examine in the chapter that is included in Terms for Endearment, because one of the companies I was writing a case study on was involved in the initiative. The Plus Group (a working group seeking to implement the Forest Stewardship Council accreditation scheme in the UK) seemed to me to be an especially interesting context to explore the kinds of questions that I was interested in. Here, I sensed, the moral complexion of the different partners might come into sharp relief. Not exactly a “good” NGO facing up to a whole bunch of “bad” companies like some latter day cowboy story. But certainly plenty of potential for a collision of moral worldviews – or more broadly culture clash as the chapter title puts it.

So I got deeper and deeper into the initiative, and became invigorated by exploring the cultural dimensions of business-NGO partnerships. A number of researchers had alluded to the potential for culture problems to arise, but no one had investigated them in any real depth. In the end, I got so into it that, like a badly behaved guest, I probably wound up staying longer than I was supposed to. But I also think that the kind of work I was doing was necessary to move our knowledge up a level.

Looking back now, I think that the chapter still holds up well. It shows that there are different ways of thinking about culture with respect to partnerships, which is a point still missed by many people who study the phenomenon. In that respect, I think it’s great that Greenleaf is making the pdf of the chapter freely available. It will help to disseminate the more critical approach to culture that the piece showcases.

And then there are the insights I provide about the role played by ‘cultural mediators’ in managing cultural translations across and within organizations. At the time that I was writing the chapter, more than a decade ago, this seemed fresh and new. It captured a very real and, I think, important dynamic at play in partnerships. In fact, I’ve had a number of practitioners over the years that have the read the piece saying, ‘yes, that’s exactly what I do!”

So the identification of cultural mediators, and my analysis of the role they play in this complex cultural milieu of partnerships, still rings true. Actually today, it’s much more commonplace for partnering organizations to go so far as to formally identify such a role: NGOs have partnership managers; companies have stakeholder relationship managers and other similar posts. But if we peer beneath the surface, we’ve still got a long way to go before we really understand what’s going on here.

That said, I’ve been heartened in the last few years to see some interesting studies emerging which really help us to see these deeper cultural dynamics more clearly. May Seitanidi, for instance, explores in her recently published book, The Politics of Partnerships, the dangers posed by seeking partners with too great a cultural fit, and the limits to meaningful change imposed by managing away conflict. Bahar Ali Kazmi, who is completing his PhD at the University of Nottingham, has been looking at how cultural mediators operate among different moral logics in the realization of human rights in developing countries. So there’s a lot of great work going on. And I expect that in another 10 years time, we’ll be looking back at how the research of these emerging scholars has helped shape the evolving field of business-NGO partnerships.”