Professionals from across sectors meet to discuss and deliberate on India and Sustainability Standards

By Centre for Responsible Business (CRB)

Hon’ble Minister for Micro, Small and Medium

Scale Enterprises, Shri. Kalraj Mishra,
inaugurating the conference

The Centre for Responsible Business (CRB) along with its partners organised a three-day international conference on Sustainability Standards at Hyatt Regency, New Delhi, from 18th - 20th November, 2015. With 50 partners, 23 sessions and 500 plus delegates & speakers, India and Sustainability Standards: International Dialogues and Conference 2015, was a landmark event that succeeded in achieving its goal of convening international and Indian stakeholders to initiate dialogue, build understanding, and exchange proposals centered on paths forward on sustainability across a range of industry sectors, commodities and themes. Some of the key partners of the three-day event included the Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change, Government of India, Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Government of India, ISEAL Alliance, UNICEF, UNDP, C&A Foundation, OECD, GIZ and Alliance for Integrity.

Dr. Bimal Arora, Chairperson, Centre for Responsible Business (CRB) setting the context for the conference said, “Sustainability standards offer the frameworks for businesses to set their sustainability agendas and provide tools to drive sustainable processes within their organization. Business community must play a proactive role and overcome challenges to take leadership roles in supporting these processes. Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) provide these guiding frameworks to businesses and complement government policies. For Standards to be credible, however, multi-stakeholder engagement is required, especially with businesses which are expected to implement these standards. Hence we found it useful to put together this platform to bring together policy makers, businesses, standard setting bodies, civil society and the academia to address challenges and design way forward for standard setting and their implementation in the Indian context.”

Dr. BimalArora, Chairperson, Centre for Responsible Business, 
welcoming the gathering to the 3-day conference

The conference agenda was meticulously designed and structured in three parts to enable active exchange and learning, as well as space for developing roadmaps across themes and sectors. Plenary Sessions of the conference with high profile Indian and international business leaders and policymakers and international speakers set the context on issues around the development and implementation of sustainability standards in India. A series of thematic and sector-specific Roundtables and Workshops were planned over 19th and 20th November and occupied the majority of the conference agenda. These roundtables and workshops were convened by interested international and Indian organizations and standard setters, as conference partners and co-hosts, to focus on specific issues, opportunities, challenges, and needs for the given sector, theme and topic. The final section of the conference returned to plenary and offered an opportunity to share, learn about and engage on the outcomes of the roundtables and workshops and set the agenda for way forward to be followed through in 2016 and beyond, and take stock in a conference annually.

Chief Guest of the Inaugural function, Hon’ble Minister Shri. Kalraj Mishra lauded CRB and Bimal Arora for the pro-active role being played by the organization in defining the contours of the discussions on sustainability standards in India. The Minister further mentioned that he would extend all possible support to the organization in its efforts to scale up business sustainability in India. Guest of Honour, Hon’ble Minister Shri. Suresh P Prabhu said, “When we talk about sustainability, it means different things to different people and the concept of sustainability has a very important social dimension. Standards should be an ambition that eventually can be codified into something that can be applied in the Indian context.”

Perhaps for the first time, sustainability standards have been perceived and deliberated as a journey to achieving sustainability goals, rather than mere compliances. The perception has moved beyond a mere check-box compliance-based approach. The eminent speakers emphasized the importance of sustainability standards in India and highlighted how India is being continuously watched by the World due to its key role in the global supply chain.

Roundtable on Inidan Multinationationals
 and Sustainability, 

Co-hosted by University of Manchester

University of Manchester and CRB co-hosted a dedicated roundtable on Indian Multinationals and Sustainability during the conference and invited presentations by and conversations with Indian Multinationals on their internationalisation strategies and engagement with sustainability standards and collaborative sustainability initiatives in India and globally. The AMBS and Global Development Institute (GDI) at the University of Manchester are jointly leading an ambitious and exciting research project around globalizing firms from emerging economies and their engagement with Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) and Collaborative Sustainability Initiatives (CSI). This research project is part of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) larger research programme, ‘Rising Powers and Integrated Futures’ (see http://www.risingpowers.net). The session convened by Prof Rudolf Sinkovics from the Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) and moderated by Prof. Pawan Budhwar from Aston Business School, saw a presentations from senior sustainability managers from companies like Essar, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL), Tata Sustainability Group (TSG) and Ambuja Cement.

The Centre for Responsible Business (CRB) provided a historic opportunity: to promote pathways to sustainability in India and globally. Company executives gathered with government officials and civil society leaders along with Indian and international standard setters, policymakers, businesses and civil society organizations, to look at how sustainability standards can be adopted, implemented or adapted to promote better environmental and social practices in India, including in the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) world as part of the global production networks and value chains.

For more information, please visit the conference website here.

Rethinking How Business Contributes to Society

By Noemi Sinkovics, Rudolf R. Sinkovics, Samia Hoque and Laszlo Czaban

Image by Sujin Jetkasettakorn, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In a recent article published in Critical perspectives on international business, 11 (3/4), the authors propose a reconceptualization of social value creation as social constraint alleviation.

Scholars from various disciplines have been pondering about how to grasp the impact of business on society. Most people would agree that it is desirable for business to contribute to wider society, but how should such a contribution be defined? Is it donating toys to a local kindergarten? Or are we talking about multinationals transferring technology to a developing country through foreign investment? Or about Nike and Levis auditing working conditions in their supply chain? To clarify the definition, we suggest that the extent to which companies help alleviating social constraints may be a useful way to think about business’ contribution to society.

Such a focus on addressing social constraints may help to clarify discussions across a number of disciplinary areas. Fields as diverse as international business, global value chains, social entrepreneurship, or corporate social responsibility all address the business-society relation from different angles. International business often looks at business’ social impact in terms of spill-over effects of foreign direct investment on the domestic economy, or in terms of corporate social responsibility initiatives helping acceptance of multinationals entering a country. Experts on global value chains describe how social upgrading can improve working conditions and income of workers. The social entrepreneurship literature discusses mutual value creation in bottom of the pyramid markets, enabling poor consumers and firms to benefit at the same time. Discussions on business and human rights ask whether corporate social responsibility initiatives go beyond improving a company’s image and can actually result in “doing well by doing good”. All would like to achieve a positive impact of business on society, but how exactly such social value creation can be defined stays unclear.

We argue that ideally a positive contribution of business to society consists of promoting social and economic human rights. This follows Todaro & Smith’s (2011) core values of development: sustenance, self-esteem and freedom from servitude. To see how such a contribution can be reached, it may be helpful to see society as a complex adaptive system, drawing on complexity science and systems theory. From such a perspective, a single constraint may keep the system from functioning and prevent it from reaching certain development outcomes we would like to see. Then, for businesses to contribute to the outcome of human rights, they need to address the social constraint(s) that are the root cause(s) holding back development in a specific community or society. Only addressing a symptom of the underlying social constraints will not really help because it will not change anything about how the system as a whole functions. For example, handing out free food to homeless people may help to alleviate hunger momentarily, but does nothing to address the underlying root cause or social constraint that makes these people live on the streets in the first place. Hence, such an action will not create lasting value for society.

How can a focus on underlying social constraints look like in practice? In our fieldwork in India we met a social entrepreneur who managed to address the root cause of poverty in a rural community. In this case, many young people in the community were living in poverty even though they had high levels of education. Social norms obliged graduates to return to their families in the village after finishing their studies in the city, even though there were no adequate jobs available for them at home. Recognising the social constraint of labour immobility among young people, the social entrepreneur founded a business process outsourcing company based in that rural area. The business model was based on providing services remotely via the internet, while drawing on the local pool of educated but immobile labour in the community. As a result, the underlying root cause of poverty, i.e. young people being unable to move, was addressed and the business contributed to realising subsistence and self-esteem needs in the community.

Summing up, we propose that seeing social value creation in terms of alleviating social constraints is a helpful starting point for comprehending how business can contribute to realising human rights in society. Further research will be needed to explore how such social constraints can best be operationalised, and how social and economic human rights can be broken down further for the purpose of this discussion.

For further details, see:

Sinkovics, Noemi, Rudolf R Sinkovics, Samia Hoque, and Laszlo Czaban (2015), "A reconceptualization of social value creation as social constraint alleviation," Critical Perspectives on International Business, 11 (3/4), 340-363. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-06-2014-0036