Recently we had two very interesting lectures from guest speakers. First was Dr Mick Blowfield from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. His main specialism is Corporate Responsibility.
He gave an excellent overview on looking at which companies do CR well and those that don't. BAT (that's British American Tobacco) are one of the leaders and they are genuinely making serious attempts at CR. I just find it hard to take CR seriously from a company that, ultimately, promotes death!
However, we were then treated to a sucker punch from Dr Blowfield who applied the same critical approaches to the Fairtrade standard. And, do you know what? If you do apply the same standards of openess and transparancy you won't find answers on the FairTrade Foundation web site, nor will you find third party verification or criticisms. A superb lecture that challenged a sacred cow, but ultimately is right in its approach: you can't have one standard of reporting for Big Business and a different one for NGOs or social enterprises.
This week we were treated to lecture from Dr Tauni Lanier, who was the first Managing Director of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index was senior project manager at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, where her responsibility was to construct the business case for Corporate Social Responsibility reporting. Another very good lecture looking at venture philanthropy and CR.
What struck me was her opinion on WalMart's Sustainability Index - something I had blogged about a few weeks back - in which she argued that it was greenwash to avoid making any progress on their labour rights. Yet today, we had someone from the Carbon Trust who was extolling WalMart's decision.
It's about pragmatism in the end. Am I going to stop buying FairTrade coffee because it doesn't have the same transparancy as BAT? No, but my eyes are open and they need to make sure they don't get caught out on this. Is WalMart's decision greenwash or not? I want to believe that it's not and that by taking this decision it may start to encourage them to think about the benefits (ultimately to the bottom line, in the end) of better labour rights.
Naive? Maybe. What do you think?
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an easy response is... well, this is social science, there are no easy answers, no objective truths, and so it all depends on your perspective... but you knew that anyway!
ReplyDeleteDid you get any sense of whether Fair Trade had been contacted re the findings and, if so, how they responded?
ReplyDeleteMy view is that we've got to keep watching them all to see if progress in the right direction continues to be made, or whether things grind to a halt (and start to poke/prompt if this happens).
Someone from FairTrade contacted me and asked what I was looking for, but they agreed that more could be done to be more transparent.
ReplyDeleteOn November 7th at Oxford Business School Dr Blowfield is debating with Mike Hickie, deputy director of the Fairtrade Foundation on whether FairTrade contributes to development.
So I think there will be improvements in the future. One of things Dr Blowfield mentioned that I hadn't thought of was the "contracting out" of CR and its risks to NGOs and organisations like the FairTrade Foundation. This then increases the risks and exposure for FairTrade.