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Hohnen: Governments can't sit on the sidelines
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- Isn’t it good, Norwegian Wood?
- Mandatory reporting
Opinion:
The Global Compact and GRI: Nightmare or “dream team’’ ?
As the UN Global Compact and GRI bask in the glow of their recent summits, Paul Hohnen says it’s time now to ask hard questions about how they can mainstream themselves over the next decade.
Individually, they have pulled off what were widely seen as high profile and well-attended conferences: GRI with its Amsterdam Global Conference held on 26-28 May; and the Global Compact with its 10th anniversary Global Leaders Summit on 23-25 June.
Together, they announced a ‘new alliance’ – based on a Memorandum of Understanding signed on 28 May - to build ‘a universal framework for corporate sustainability performance and disclosure’ aimed at transforming business practices on a global scale.
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Comments:
GRI glass ceiling - Mehrdad Nazari (Senior ESIA & CSR Advisor, Prizma LLC), 27 Jul 2010
Thanks for your article. Indeed, it is time to ask some tough questions and make some strategic choices in order to find better ways to break through GRI's 'glass ceiling' in terms of limited sustainability reporting uptake. Focus may need to shift from a somewhat academically oriented fine tuning towards more pragmatic approaches of mainstreaming. Mehrdad (www.prizmablog.com)
sustainability reporting - Paul James, 4 Aug 2010
Your comments are apposite, Paul. Another of the issues that the GRI and Clobal Compact face is that by starting with corporate responsibility rather than institutional responsibility they seem to be repeating the problems of triple-bottom-line reporting - that is, that it does not give full weight to the different but still fundamental integrity of reporting in the different domains of economic, ecological, political and cultural sustainability. Financial reporting within the economic domain is fundamental, but it cannot be used as homologous with other social reporting as seems to be happening with Financial and ESG reporting. It is an issue that we in the Global Compact Cities Programme have been grappling with.
Paul James, United Nations GCCP
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