A multi-year process is creating guidelines to encourage environmentally and socially sustainable activities by local, national and multi-national organizations worldwide. The document, ISO 26000, is not being designed for formal certification, but as voluntary guidelines accessible to all kinds of organizations in every country, across the globe. Participants include representatives from industry, government, labour, consumer, NGO and consulting/academic organizations, from all continents and many different countries. The process operates through consensus-based decision-making and gives numerous opportunities for different participants to raise, clarify and debate their viewpoints. This is a multi-year and multi-stakeholder process, which uses a consensus-based approach to solve disagreements. The goal is to encourage organizations from all over the world to change their operating practices to improve their environmental and social impacts.

ISO 26000 is a part of the increasing global support for 'corporate social responsibility'. By including all kinds of organizations, not only businesses, this is an example of the creation and deepening of global civil society institutions. And it is very much a "work in progress". For more information, see ISO Working Group on Social Responsibility, on the ISO website.

"Working Group" Plenary Sessions Obtain Global Input

At the 5th Plenary in Vienna, Austria, Carolyn Schmidt and Sergey Dayman represented ECOLOGIA. A grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding supported Sergey's travel costs; for the first time, a Russian Non-Governmental Organization was represented at an ISO SR plenary. See Mr. Dayman's reflections on the current state of CSR in Russia, "Russia in 2008: CSR in a Post-Socialist State".

This session was characterized by thoughtful and sometimes contentious discussions between delegates representing different constituencies. We made notable progress on several hotly debated issues, such as how to include supply chain relationships, the role of third-party evaluations, and how to deal with international norms and expectations of behavior when these conflict with national or local laws.

We also decided that organizations using the standard "should" (not "may choose to") report on each of the seven "core subjects":

• organizational governance
• human rights
• labour practices
• fair operating practices
• environment
• consumer issues
• contribution to the community and society.

This should strengthen the usefulness of the standard, since it will encourage users to examine the impact of their decisions in each of those seven issue areas.

Carolyn Schmidt presents her work in drafting Clause 7.4, Integrating Social Responsibility throughout the organization, to Task Group 6.

ECOLOGIA continues to see the supply chain / value chain relationships as one of the keys to make the ISO 26000 guidance standard meaningful and useful. Much work remains to be done. See ECOLOGIA's Briefing Papers on the issue of supply chain management in the context of Chinese manufacturing:

• "Fixing the Weak Links in China's Supply Chain"
• " 'Glocal' Solutions to Standards and Monitoring"
• "Rescuing China's Supply Chain"

While in Vienna, Carolyn also participated as a panelist at a meeting of the Austrian Business Council for Sustainable Development; the topic was "Corporate Social Responsibility: Voluntary Standards or Regulations?"

January-February 2007 - Sydney

Sydney, Australia hosted the 4th Plenary of the ISO working Group on Social Responsibility. ECOLOGIA's delegates, Carolyn Schmidt and Katharine Cooley, dealt with issues such as:

• how can the guidelines be written clearly and simply, to apply to all types of organizations?;
• how can organizations best identify their "stakeholders" (those whom they affect, with whom they need to communicate);
• and how should the standard direct its users to act with regard to their supply chains (organizations they buy from and sell to)?

May 2006 - Lisbon

In Lisbon, Portugal, ECOLOGIA participated in the 3rd Plenary of the ISO Working Group on Social Responsibility. The ambitious goals for this session included major substantive progress on the different elements of the SR standard (definition and scope, core concepts, guidance on specific issues) and major procedural process to ensure effective and diverse participation for the remaining two years of developing the standard. Emerging from a week of discussions and debates, a major achievement of this session was the creation of numerous ad hoc Task Groups, charged with developing language and identifying areas of agreement for specific topics. Work to empower a variety of non-traditional ISO stakeholder groups - such as developing countries, consumer and labor organizations, and NGOs - continues. The difficulties of meaningful participation by Non-Native English speakers have emerged, and should be a topic for consideration before the next plenary.

In addition to Randy Kritkausky and Carolyn Schmidt, ECOLOGIA also supported the attendance of the Lithuanian NGO observer delegate, Giedre Donauskaite.

September 2005 - Bangkok

The 2nd Plenary of the working group met in Bangkok, Thailand. We achieved the main goal for this session - agreement on the Design Specification for the new standard. The 350 delegates (from 43 countries and 24 international organizations) worked according to ISO's consensus approach, in which everyone participating needs to support decisions, and differences are talked out and resolved by deliberation and compromise. The goal is to ensure that all participants (different nations and 'stakeholder groups') will support the final product.

March 2005 - The First Plenary - Salvador, Bahia

From March 7 – 11, 2005, ISO brought together over 300 delegates from around the world, at its First Plenary on Social Responsibility in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. This was, and still is, a new field for the Geneva-based ISO, known for writing technical standards (dealing with issues such as the compatibility of nuts and bolts) and management process standards such as ISO 9000. Over the last five decades, ISO has developed thousands of voluntary standards created largely by and for industry. The primary purpose of these standards has been to make it easier for companies to trade across international borders and to be able to have guarantees of product component compatibility and quality. As a result ISO has become the pre-eminent global standards making organization.

March 2005 Background on ISO SR and Global Governance

ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is taking important steps toward the development of a global standard on social and environmental sustainability. ISO is referring to this as a standard on “social responsibility”, a somewhat misleadingly narrow term given the fact that the standard is expected to address a broad range of organizational activities including social, labor, and environmental impacts. As ISO develops this new standard, it should transform how concepts like “corporate social responsibility” and “the triple bottom line” are defined, measured and reported on. Of equal importance, ISO has established a ground-breaking new approach to stakeholder involvement in its own standards development that could transform the world of standards making and spill over into the broader sphere of global governance. ISO identified six different categories of "stakeholders"; these categories are all represented among the delegations creating the new standard. Industry, Government, Labour, Consumer, NGO, and SSRO (Service, Support, Research and Others).

Purpose of ISO 26000 - the global "Social Responsibility" standard:

The Goal of the ISO Social Responsibility standard is to encourage organizations around the world to improve their performance on key indicators of sustainable development. By reducing environmental damage caused by their operations, and improving the living conditions and health of their workers, organizations have the ability to improve the quality of life for the communities in which they operate.

Challenges

As the process starts, (March 2005), there are six major challenges facing the creation of the ISO Social Responsibility standard:

1. How can it apply to a variety of organizations (industry, government, non-profits, labor unions, etc.) without becoming so weak and vague that it lowers rather than raises expectations about performance?
2. How can the "multi-stakeholder approach" be fairly implemented, given the dominance of the English language, and the western style of parliamentary debate, during working group sessions?
3. How can it apply both to developing and developed countries without being unrealistically demanding on the former, or providing no incentives for the latter ?
4. How can it address the needs of a range of organizations, including small and medium-sized enterprises, when ISO standards traditionally have required specialization and have been used mainly by large corporations with resources to implement them and to pay for ISO certification?
5. How exactly will organizations that use the ISO SR standard be required to communicate with their stakeholders (the people and groups impacted by the organization’s actions)? Indeed, how will ‘stakeholders’ be identified and defined? These decisions are very significant, because if ‘stakeholders’ are defined too narrowly, much of the potential of the ISO SR standard for community dialogue and public accountability will be lost.
6. How can it directly incorporate supply chain responsibilities and purchaser/consumer information, so that it will be truly useful as the chain becomes more global and complex?

Procedures

ISO is working to make the development of its ISO SR standard as representative and inclusive as possible. The process will take at least three years. Participation by representatives from a wide variety of stakeholder groups is crucial for them to 'buy into' the standard and to believe in its usefulness. Six "sectors" were identified; each country participating is encouraged to involve a representative from each one: industry, government, labour, consumers, NGOs, and "others" (service, support, research and others).

Decisions Made in Advance - The Framework Provided by ISO

• The standard will be for "guidance" only - ISO will not require third party certification.
• The standard will be written in accessible language, making it "user-friendly" to understand and to implement.
• The standards development process will involve representatives from developing countries intensively. There is a "twinning" requirement: each committee, as well as the SR standard-development process overall, will be co-chaired by a pair of representatives, one from a developed country, and one from a developing one. For example, the Co-Chairs of the First Plenary were from Sweden and Brazil.
• Liaison Organizations (such as ECOLOGIA) will be given a more prominent role in the writing of the SR standard than in previous ISO standards. Liaison members are internationally active organizations with expertise in specific areas relevant to the ISO standards work. Historically, ISO membership has focused around National Standards Bodies in each participating country; Liaison representatives had observer status at ISO meetings. But for the ISO SR standard, Liaison expert delegates have been approved for functions such as voting and co-chairing committees.

Conclusion

The new ISO SR standard provides an unprecedented opportunity for global discussion and widespread involvement to implement the goals of “sustainable development” at many levels of organizational activity throughout the world. We at ECOLOGIA see this as an opportunity to increase the influence and capacity of civil society organizations as we work together toward truly sustainable and equitable global development.

ECOLOGIA Background and Briefing Papers: Examining the Issues, Proposing Solutions

• Governance by Standards: Opportunities for Civil Society Organizations November 2004
• China’s Socially Responsible Entrepreneurs: Native Roots for Sustainable Development