Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Corporate Social Responsibility News
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Analysis: Copenhagen revisited?
It was heralded as a key stepping stone to a more sustainable age - now it's teetering on the brink of becoming a monumental embarrassment.
When the new ISO 26000 standard was first mooted - a standard that looked set to define corporate social responsibility - it was hoped that the legislative framework would provide companies, and organisations with a blueprint for a greener future.
The standard will cover every aspect of CSR, including procurement and although it itself is only designed to offer guidance, it already appears to be having an impact on the way that B2B suppliers are operating.
Ethicalcorp recently retold a story from the Korean newspaper, JoongAngDaily, which told how a Korean exporter was dumped by an importer after it admitted that it had not yet developed strategies to meet the requirements outlined in the new set of international standards. Whether this tells the whole story is unclear, but it does suggest that the new standard is going to play an increasingly important role for both procurement and suppliers when, or if, it finally gets approval.
Now, amid a heady mix of legal challenges and pressure applied from the top level of governments across the world - most notably China and the US - the new standard is entering its final stages in a far more watered-down form than even the most ardent pessimists gathered around the negotiating table in Copenhagen in 2005, would have predicted.
Of course, this is far from the first time that sustainability has come to the fore. The ISO 1400 standard was first established in 1992, as part of a framework of legislation aimed at placing a greater emphasis on sustainability following the Rio Summit on the Environment. And while its creation didn't exactly have procurement executives dancing for joy, the global reach it has achieved in the intervening period has played a key role in raising environmental and ethical sourcing standards across the world.
"Out of ISO's 18,100 standards, over 500 are directly related to environmental subjects and many more than that can help in reducing environmental impacts," says Roger Frost, a manager of communication services at the International Organisation for Standardisation. "They range from standards for sampling, testing and analytical methods, through environmental management and environmental aspects of product design, to new work on ship recycling."
That said, the creation of the 26000 standard was far more ambitious, and although it has now finally reached 'draft international standard' status, it's far from certain that there will be consensus when the national standards organisations convene in Copenhagen in May.
"Crunch time" is how Paul Hohnen, an accredited expert in the ISO 26000 process from the very start, describes the situation facing key decision makers in the Danish capital. "As things look now, its passage to final approval is far from being a given."
The fact that both the US and Chinese government are sufficiently concerned about its content and potential implications, that they have sent top ranking diplomats to the negotiating table indicates the nervousness with which the standard is viewed.
Hohnen even claims that pressure has been applied in a rather more basic form to ensure that the standard in its current form is rejected. There is, though, a chink of light, partly engendered by the overwhelming sense of disappointment resulting from the Copenhagen conference back in December.
That event was supposed to herald a new era of international collaboration on the environment. In reality, it merely served to illustrate just how divided views in the world's major economic powers are. A repeat, particularly in the same city, would provide another hammer blow for the reputations of countries like the USA and China - something both will be keen to avoid, at all cost.
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