Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy, Communication, Governance

To be honest, I have always thought of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as consisting of fairly tokenistic gestures by companies to subsidise local community activities, or theatres or museums, in order to improve their image and reputation. And yet when in government I quite often sought out agreements with the corporate sector in order to achieve international development objectives. And since leaving the House of Commons in 2010 I have spent five years chairing the International Board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) which brings together governments, companies and civil society in order to bring transparency into the management of the extractive sector. The aim is to use transparency to counter the corruption for which the sector is notorious; and to improve accountability so that people derive real benefits from their natural resources. On reflection, the initiatives with which I was involved created a form of regulation which for me extends the concept of CSR in a most interesting and significant way. Perhaps my most helpful contribution here might be to describe the initiatives in which I was involved in a way that illustrates how and why such new regulatory arrangements arise.

The fair trade movement was gathering strength when I became Secretary of State for International Development in the UK in 1997. We were keen to encourage this movement because it guaranteed a fair price to poor coffee growers, cocoa farmers etc. so that they and their families had a better standard of living and more security. I provided funding to the fair trade headquarters and supported the movement's work in any way I could. The foundation carefully researched and then awarded the Fairtrade label to products that were procured in a way that guaranteed decent wages to suppliers of raw materials and encouraged ethical consumers to buy these products. With a similar objective but potentially larger impact, the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) was launched in 1998 to bring together companies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and trade unions to protect workers’ rights in global supply chains. Big UK companies such as Littlewoods, The Body Shop, Sainsbury's and Asda were early members of the ETI which works to try to enforce International Labour Organization (ILO) standards through the global supply chains.