Briefing comment

Leaders and the led: which come first? by Mike Tuffrey
The issue of leadership – and responsibility – is very much in the air. As I write, the plutocrats are meeting in Davos, debating the future of capitalism; the Republicans are struggling to find a credible presidential candidate; bankers and EU governments are trading insults about who should take a haircut and how much fat cats should be paid – and all the while, Western economies bump along the bottom, at best.

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News & analysis

Daily CSR Media Briefing
The headlines:
  • Indian Corporate Affairs Ministry unlikely to heed calls for mandatory CSR in Companies Bill
  • Use Rio+20 to overhaul idea of growth, urges EU climate chief
  • Kraft Foods cuts global manufacturing waste by half
  • National Apprenticeships Week: Starbucks launches its first UK apprenticeship scheme
  • UNESCO and IEEE sign partnership to promote engineering education in Africa
  • National Apprenticeships Week: Starbucks launches its first UK apprenticeship scheme
What do we think? Peter Truesdale discusses raising tax in the mining industry.


Research & Policy
Indian Corporate Affairs Ministry unlikely to heed calls for mandatory CSR in Companies Bill The Corporate Affairs Ministry in India is unlikely to...

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Around the World
The latest headlines from around the world;
  • Europe and US: EU warns wasting environmental resources could spark new recession
  • Asia: India plans science policy to help tackle poverty and development
  • Africa: Nigeria reels after oil subsidy row turns into country's biggest ever protest
  • Latin America: Ecuador appeals court rules against Chevron in oil case


Europe and US
EU warns wasting environmental resources could spark new recession The overuse and waste of valuable natural resources is threatening to produce a fresh economic crisis. Janez Po...

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Industry News
The latest news from the key industries;
  • Finance: Dutch pension giant excludes Wal-Mart and PetroChina
  • Textile / Apparel: Patagonia registers as first California ‘Benefit Corporation’
  • Food & Beverage: Coke steps up drive for plant-based bottles
  • Natural resources: Gas boom has Youngstown (Ohio) making steel again
  • Partnerships: Disappearing barriers between business and nonprofits driving innovation


Finance
Dutch pension giant excludes Wal-Mart and PetroChina ABP Investments, the largest Dutch pension fund and one of the most influential institutional investors in t...

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Consumers
Comment piece by Nicole Clucas for October/November CCB 120


Food waste has been an issue for many years. Over consumption and the increase in ‘buy one get one free’ offers at many supermarkets make it all too easy for some of our weekly shop to end up in the bin. According to the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, we thr...

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Community and Contributions
Comment by Mayaz Rahman for October/November CCB 120


The “Giving in Numbers” report shows us that overall corporate giving levels remained static in 2010, and earlier in the year a similar report looking at UK corporate giving showed the same thing. In neither country has giving recovered to pre-recession leve...

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Employment and Diversity
Comment piece by Stephanie Caun for October/November CCB


Business in the Community, Deloitte and BP launch ambitious social enterprise project to create 1,000 new jobs in the Olympic host boroughs Gender diversity has been high on the business age...

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Environment and Sustainability
Comment by Ian Buckland for October/November CCB 120


Wet Wet Wet We do all like to talk about the weather. Maybe it’s just because there’s so much of it and it’s something we all can share. Looking back on 2011, rainfall pa...

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Human Rights
Comment by Stephanie Slack for October/November CCB 120


Consumers demand Hershey stop buying child labour Raise the Bar Hershey! Is leading a campaign on Change.org calling for an end to ongoing labour abuses in the cocoa industry in child, forced or trafficked labour. The campaign is target...

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Responsible investment
Comment by Peter Truesdale for October/November CCB 120.


Social Impact Investment? I’m a nervous Nellie investor I am a sceptic. If a tren...

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Strategy
Comment by Tara James for October/November CCB 120.


Three words stand out for me in this round up of stories: Ecosystem, Innovation and Collaboration. GRI, UNEP and CREM have released a publication looking at how companies can report performance on ecosystem services; the WEF is looking at the sustainable com...

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Supply chain
Comment by Hugh Macpherson for October/November CCB 120.


The move by John West to start making their supply chain more transparent and accountable is an intriguing development in food retail. The more customers can be informed of the way in which their food has been produced the better. This development, combined...

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“How not to be an Ostrich: CSR and Sustainability managers fac...
When faced with risk, the Ostrich ( Struthio camelus) is famously believed to bury its head in the sand. Whilst this belief might not be strictly accurate, an ostrich may certainly try to avoid detection by lying lowin response to a possible threat, a strategy not dissimilar to that of some major companies and industrial sectors in response to the challenges posed by major ecological risks.


The sustainability challenges facing CSR and sustainability managers today are complex and wide ranging. These specifically include climate change and growing water scarcity, due to population growth, economic activities and other drivers. However, a threat that is far less understood, bu...

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Employment and diversity comment and news
Comment by Stephanie Slack for August/September CCB 119


As a recent graduate I was pleased and very interested to read that KPMG are set to hire 250,000 new employees over the next five years, 75,000 of whom will be graduates. This news makes a welcome change from the endless reports of firms axing jobs as a resu...

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Guest Writer

A quiet revolution - has the role of the CEO changed?
This month our guest writer is Matthew Gitsham, Director of the Centre for Business and Sustainability at Ashridge Business School.

The behaviour of businesses and business leaders has got back onto the political agenda in the past few months with both UK and United States political leaders arguing about distinguishing between good ‘producers’ and bad ‘predators’, and how best to come up with a more responsible form of capitalism. Since the credit crunch, negative stereotypes of business...

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Speaking out

Building a high performance board
This month Andrew Wilson speaks out about responsibility within Boards.

Good corporate governance and responsible business practice should be synonymous. Unfortunately, this is not always case. The truth is that Board attention often focuses too narrowly on financial controls and operational risks. Broader reputational issues relating to social and environmental aspects of the business remain low on the agenda – if they appear there at all....

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Local supply legislation bites
This month Peter Truesdale discusses supply chain legislation.

New Year’s Day 2012 was something of a high water mark in corporate responsibility related legislation. Why? Well a short, snappy piece of State of California legislation came into force. Even the new law’s title is snappy (by legal standards). It requires firms with a global income in excess of US$100m to disclose “their efforts t...

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Liza Lort-Phillips on cause-related marketing
Here lies the important distinction between a brand that simply wants to do something responsible to create a warm and fuzzy effect, and a responsible brand. While consumers clearly like the former, they increasingly expect the latter.

Thirst Aid joins a growing list of brands competing for high profile cause-related marketing campaigns in the bottled water sector. In a year that has seen the industry vilified as ‘the next tobacco’ for its environmental impacts - both water and plastic - it comes as no surprise that another brand (following the likes of One, Belu and Volvic) has launched another initiative to ‘offset’...

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Amy Lunt on Anglo American's biodiversity investment
Foreign operators must demonstrate the positives they will bring to a community, to counteract the perceived negatives such as environmental damage and disruption to local communities.

Anglo American’s $92 million investment in community and biodiversity projects in Brazil reflects not only the scale of the company’s operations, but the significance of corporate responsibility to its core business. The mining industry produces some of the most visible and tangible impacts both on local communities and the natural environment. Extractive com...

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“How not to be an Ostrich: CSR and Sustainability managers fac...
When faced with risk, the Ostrich ( Struthio camelus) is famously believed to bury its head in the sand. Whilst this belief might not be strictly accurate, an ostrich may certainly try to avoid detection by lying lowin response to a possible threat, a strategy not dissimilar to that of...

The sustainability challenges facing CSR and sustainability managers today are complex and wide ranging. These specifically include climate change and growing water scarcity, due to population growth, economic activities and other drivers. However, a threat that is far less understood, but perhaps poses the greatest challenge to business, has to do with the growing pressure on ecosystem...

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Doom and gloom, or seasonal cheer?
In the run up to the Cancun climate change conference, we ask if there are reasons to be cheerful about what companies are doing, despite the backdrop of bad news on the global environment.

It’s possible to get very depressed in this line of business. The bad news seems to outweigh the positive, many times over. Even hopeful initiatives like the Nagoya convention on biodiversity only have mixed outcomes. And just as we go to press, political trends in the US Congress seem likely to make action by the world’s largest economy and biggest consumer more illusive than ever.

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Bonuses are back...... or never again.
One year on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the anger among ordinary citizens about the behaviour of the bankers and their lack of accountability is palpable, reflected in politicians' rhetoric.

President Obama goes to New York and lays it on the line. After trillions of dollars, pounds and euros have been spent bailing out the banks, behaviour has to change. No more bailouts, he says. The trouble is, one year on we seem no nearer the fundamental changes needed to stop it all happening again - some sort of new Glass-Steagal, in shorthand. So the twin...

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Copyright 2006 Corporate Citizenship Briefing