Civil Society Hearing “Whose Partnership for Whose Development?: Corporate Accountability in the UN System beyond the Global Compact”

Peter Utting’s speech to the International Forum on the Social-Science Policy Nexus highlights a number of institutional developments and forms of regulatory policies to promote corporate accountability

Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Regulation

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.UNRISD_CoportateSocialResponsibilityAndBusinessRegulation_2004.pdf: 4087 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Corporate Responsibility and Labour Issues in China: Reflections on a Beijing Conference

Brief notes on some of the issues discussed at a conference in Beijing concerning corporate responsibility and labor issues in China. The discussion centers on whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) can move on from the current experimental phase into a broader system for “regulating” business practices. Further, it reviews the main factors and conditions that encourage or oblige individual companies to engage with the CSR agenda, and that need to be in place if CSR is to be scaled-up

The Global Compact: Why All the Fuss?

Brief article providing an outline of the Global Compact and the polarized opinions of critics and supporters of the nine principles embodied within it. It also discusses the trade-offs and diversions that the compact generates

Conference News: Business, Social Policy and Corporate Political Influence in Developing Countries

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.UNRISD_Conference_BusSocPolCorpPoliInfluence.pdf: 1114 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Business responsibility for sustainable development

Development agencies and actors concerned with promoting sustainable development have been joined in recent years by another player - big business. Increasing adherence on the part of senior managers to concepts like corporate citizenship or corporate social responsibility suggests that this sector of business is beginning to recast its relationship with both the environment and its multiple stakeholders. This evolving situation stands in sharp contrast to the scenario of the past when big business was seen to be insensitive to the needs of certain stakeholders and responsible for much of the environmental degradation of the planet. This paper assesses the reality behind the claims of some sectors of business that an increasing number of large firms are adopting policies and practices conducive to the promotion of sustainable development, particularly in developing countries. After describing various institutional developments that have occurred in the 1990s and that appear to be promoting corporate social and environmental responsibility, the paper assesses the current state of play, highlighting in particular the incipient and piecemeal nature of change. It goes on to examine whether there are forces or an enabling environment in place that might permit a scaling up of initiatives associated with corporate responsibility. Some of the more powerful forces that drive corporate responsibility are identified. The question of why some sectors of business are changing reveals an answer that has less to do with a new-found ethical concern among corporate executives for the environmental and social condition of the planet, than with economic, political and structural factors. These include so-called "win-win" opportunities, the possibility of enhancing competitive advantage, "reputation management", pressure group and consumer politics, regulation or the threat of regulation, and changes in the way production and marketing are being organized globally. While such "drivers" may encourage corporations to be more responsive to environmental and social concerns, it is argued that the process of change is likely to remain fairly fragmented, spread unevenly in terms of companies, countries and sectors, and, from the perspective of sustainable development, fraught with contradictions. What amounts to a fairly minimalist and uneven agenda is not simply a reflection of the fact that the process of change is of recent origin; it also derives from the way in which companies choose to respond to the economic, political and structural drivers of change - responses that often involve imagery, public relations and relatively minor adjustments in management systems and practices, as opposed to significant changes in the social and environmental impact of a company's activities. The final section of the paper reflects on how trends associated with corporate environmental and social responsibility might be both scaled up and "deepened", so that business can make a more meaningful contribution to sustainable development. It begins by considering whether the dominant approach that is currently in vogue centred on the promotion of "voluntary initiatives" and "partnerships" is likely to be effective. While there are important benefits that can derive from such institutional arrangements, there may also be a considerable downside that is often overlooked. The success of many voluntary initiatives requires a certain institutional setting - for example, basic laws related to disclosure and freedom of information, watchdog institutions and strong civil society movements. Such conditions may be weak or absent in many countries. Furthermore, certain initiatives, such as codes of conduct and certification systems, have often been designed by Northern actors, be they governments, NGOs or corporate interests. Southern governments and NGOs are often marginalized in the decision-making processes that affect them. Too often, voluntary initiatives are held up as substitutes for government regulation when in fact various forms of legislation and state sanctions are often what motivated such initiatives in the first place and are crucial for their success. Despite the obvious appeal of the pragmatic and co-operative features of "partnerships", involving, for example, business and United Nations agencies or NGOs, serious questions are raised about their impact. Of particular concern are issues related to the weak criteria often used by United Nations and other organizations to select corporate partners, the way in which more critical voices are silenced as NGOs and United Nations agencies get closer to business, and the problem of "institutional capture" as business comes to exercise influence over decision-making processes associated with the public sphere. Perhaps the most significant concern with some forms of voluntary initiatives and partnerships is that they may serve to weaken key drivers of corporate responsibility - namely government regulation, collective bargaining and certain forms of civil society activism. If one examines the history of corporate environmental and social responsibility, and some of the major reforms of corporate policies and practices, one or a combination of these factors has been crucial. The paper ends with a call for "rethinking regulation and partnerships". There is potentially an important role for certain forms of "co-regulation". These may involve, for example, so-called "negotiated agreements" between government and business, and "civil regulation", where NGOs, consumers and trade unions have considerable influence in determining the standards and norms shaping business relations with society and the environment. Key to the success of co-regulation are not only the "softed" features of dialogue and compromise, but also the "hard" ones of government sanctions; laws related to disclosure and freedom of information, freedom of association and collective bargaining; and various forms of civil society protest. To avoid the ongoing proliferation of weak codes of conduct and certification and reporting systems, it is important that there be some degree of harmonization and adherence to higher standards. This implies a greater role for international codes and frameworks, which use as benchmarks internationally agreed standards contained or implied in such documents as Agenda 21 and ILO and human rights conventions. There should also be a greater role for "independent verification" of codes of conduct, environmental management systems and UN-business partnerships. Greater attention needs to be paid, however, to the status or legitimacy of the verifiers. Rethinking partnerships involves not only addressing the concerns raised above, but also recognizing the need to build a stronger civil society movement for change by strengthening links between environmentalists, consumer groups, social-interest NGOs and trade unions

The Peasant Question and Development Policy in Nicaragua

Summary Summary Government policy towards the peasantry has undergone significant changes during the past three years. This article identifies the principal changes involved and analyses why they occurred. The peasant question in Nicaragua, as in other socialist transitions, has involved dealing with four key issues associated with the growth of overall food production, the extraction of surplus, improving living levels of peasant families and forging the worker?peasant alliance. A combination of factors had a negative impact on each of these. Correcting a series of planning imbalances provided the government with room for manoeuvre to deal with the peasant question and consolidate a ‘survival economy’. Resumé Resumé La Question Paysanne et la Politique de Développement au Nicaragua La politique du gouvernement vis?à?vis la classe paysanne, a été substantiellement revue dans les trois dernières années. Cet article identifie les changements principaux et analyse la raison pour laquelle ils eurent lieu. La question paysanne au Nicaragua, comme dans toutes autres transitions socialistes, a inclu, faire face à quatre problèmes essentiels associés à la croissance générale de la production pour l'alimentation, l'extraction du surplus, l'ammélioration du niveau de vie des familles paysannes et créer l'alliance travailleurs?paysans. Une combinaison de facteurs ont eu un impacte négatif sur chacun d'eux. La correction d'une série de mauvais ajustements dans la planification procura au gouvernement l'espace nécessaire pour prendre en considération la question paysanne et consolider ‘l'économie d'urgence’

The ODO project: a Case Study in Integration of Multimedia Services

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth in the availability of wide-area multi-service networks. These support a variety of traffic types including data, control messages, audio and video. Consequently they are often thought of as integrated media carriers. To date, however, use of these networks has been limited to isolated applications which exhibit very little or no integration amongst themselves. This paper describes a project which investigated organisational, user interfacing and programming techniques to exploit this integration of services at the application level

Green economy or green society? Contestation and policies for a fair transition

Based on research from the UNRISD inquiry into the social dimensions of green economy, this paper outlines a conceptual and policy approach to bring social concerns more centrally into green economy and sustainable development debates. The paper first examines a wide range of social problems and other issues associated with green economy, reasserting that any development transformation must be both green and fair-leading to a "green society", not just a green economy. But different transition pathways exist, each with different configurations of state, market and society relations, as well as social and developmental implications. The remainder of the paper addresses the key role of social policy, agency and participation in crafting transition paths that are green and fair. The paper argues that comprehensive or transformative social policy, which goes beyond social protection, human capital formation or green jobs by also focusing on redistribution and social reproduction, can play a key role in mitigating unfair consequences, influencing behaviour and transforming patterns of inequality. Achieving a shift towards such policies will depend crucially on addressing the politics of governance itself; specifically, the ways different actors-particularly social movements and those most disadvantaged-contest ideas and policies, participate in governance (that is, in project design and implementation, public policy making and "civil regulation"), and organize and mobilize to resist and influence change. Such arenas of policy and action are crucial both from the perspective of distributional and procedural justice, and for driving deeper structural transformations. The paper concludes by highlighting issues of fragmentation associated with knowledge, institutional arrangements and social agency, and suggests the need for "joined-up analysis, policy and action"

Post-conflict reconciliation and development in Nicaragua: The role of cooperatives and collective action

This paper examines how cooperatives affected and were affected by the profound political, economic and social transitions that have occurred in Nicaragua in recent decades. It pays particular attention to the shift from the post-revolutionary Sandinista regime of the 1980s to the "neoliberal" regime of the 1990s and early 2000s. In the early 1990s, a peace accord ended years of civil war and the Sandinista government was voted out of office by a coalition of Centrist and Right-wing parties. This meant that policies supporting state and cooperative forms of production were replaced by those favouring privatization, the rolling back of the state and the freeing up of market forces. Cooperatives and the agrarian reform process initiated by the Sandinista government were heavily impacted by this process, often in contradictory ways. Land redistribution to landless peasant farmers and cooperative organizations continued as part of the process of peace-building prior to the elections. Demobilized military and other security personnel were given land after the elections. Workers in state-owned farms and agro-industrial enterprises also acquired assets when part of the state sector was converted to worker-owned and managed enterprises. But the neoliberal era ushered in a process of decollectivization and dispossession and heavily constrained access to credit and support services for cooperatives and small-scale farmers. Agricultural workers and producers were not passive bystanders in this process. Their responses conformed to a Polanyian-type "double movement" where societal forces mobilize in myriad ways to protect against the negative social effects of economic liberalization and the dominance of market forces. The pro-market strand of the double movement centred not only on economic liberalization but also an agrarian counter-reform centred on decollectivization and returning lands to former owners. The societal reaction or "protective" strand of the double movement consisted of diverse forms of contestation, collective action and social innovation. Divided in three parts, this paper first outlines the rapid rise of the cooperative sector and its strengths and weaknesses during the post-revolutionary period from 1979 to the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. Part 2 examines the uneven trajectory of agrarian reform and cooperative development during the neoliberal 1990s, consisting of counter reform and ongoing redistribution to the landless. Part 3 examines four manifestations of the "double movement" by agricultural workers and producers. They include (i) the proliferation of civil and armed resistance in the early 1990s; (ii) the structuring of a cooperative movement; (iii) efforts to empower small coffee producers via the fair trade movement and the "quality revolution" and (iv) the drive to reactivate the smallholdings of poor rural women and organize them in pre-cooperative groups. A concluding section distils the main findings for the addressing the challenge of post-conflict reconciliation and development, and refers briefly to the implications for the cooperative movement of the return to power of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 2007. The main policy lesson for governments engaged in processes of peace-building and "post-conflict" reconstruction would seem to be: ignore the issue of inclusive agrarian development at your peril! If a disabling policy environment exists, and if demands for land and employment on the part of subaltern groups are not met, various forms of resistance will ensue, with the possibility of renewed violent conflict and the inability to govern effectively. And when a political party seemingly supportive of the cooperative sector regains the reins of power, renewed support may come at the cost of dependency and loss of autonomy of the cooperative movement