If a tea seller or a street vendor in Mumbai had drafted the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), they might have looked very different.
This imaginary version would have included more practical advice tailored to small businesses and informal sectors. Perhaps it would contain fair trade practices with a specific focus on family-run businesses and small-scale producers.
Before we are misunderstood for denouncing the UNGPs, the point we are trying to make is that the person holding the pen has significant power over how something is framed, what’s included and what isn’t.
This also applies to the way corporate respect for human rights is researched.
Although a lot of research is conducted on issues facing communities and supply chain workers living in the Global South, very little is carried out by researchers who are physically based in those countries.
If we are serious about improving business respect for the human rights of the most vulnerable, this needs to change.
Presently, our framing of business and human rights is often shaped by the issues that matter to the Global North and its priorities.
We regularly talk about “multinationals and their supply chains’’ and this can limit discourse to a top-down perspective.
Although more than half of the world’s labour force is engaged in informal work, research on standards is rarely based on these workers’ lived experiences. There is no board of directors in a tea shop, nor is the environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting framework – a set of guidelines that companies use to disclose information about their ESG performance – relevant for such an enterprise.
Stronger together
“Horizontal” collaboration between Global North and Global South researchers can lead to rich outcomes.
Take for example the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. It recently assessed a group of publicly-listed Chilean companies on their business practices using the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark Core UNGP Indicators, drawn up by the World Benchmarking Alliance.
The university assessed companies based on evidence written in the companies’ native language. Their conclusions provided a more local, direct picture of how companies are communicating about human rights with workers, communities and policymakers. The resulting analysis was more accurate than it would have been if it only considered information made available in English.
Because the university had been engaging with local businesses, policymakers and other stakeholders on responsible business conduct for many years, they were able to frame the assessment and results in the most effective way to spur change.
As a result, 10 out of the 29 companies improved their assessment score from the previous year by at least 10 percentage points, with three jumping almost 30 percentage points.
Collaboration like this can foster mutual learning and strengthen abilities by harnessing the strong knowledge of students or researchers at local institutions of the most salient human rights risks.
Many of these individuals will go on to work for various companies, where this knowledge could have a ripple effect on companies’ decision-making.
Moreover, such projects can deepen trust among those affected by the research, resulting in stronger policy advocacy that resonates more deeply with the true lives of people in these communities.
To tackle the power imbalance in supply chains, we need to address the power imbalance in academia.
It’s time for people with a lived experience of the Global South to conduct research, rather than simply being passive subjects. This way they can influence the human rights legislation that will ultimately affect businesses.
Global North governments and academic institutions can help redistribute influence by funding and collaborating with Global South researchers on projects that matter to local people.
They should improve access to resources such as books, journals and conferences (an expensive privilege that many of us in the Global North take for granted) and provide peer support and funding opportunities to nurture the next generation of scholars from the Global South.
This probably won’t lead to a tea seller or a street vendor from Mumbai writing the next edition of the UNGPs. But it might get us closer to ensuring that their rights, and the rights of the people in their community are better respected by businesses and society.
Surya Deva is the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to development and a professor at Macquarie University. Talya Swissa works for the World Benchmarking Alliance, an organisation that assesses companies’ impacts on people and planet.
This opinion piece was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit https://www.context.news/.
