Thursday, 21 Sep 2000
EN ROUTE FROM PARIS TO LONDON
The day began with yet another meeting at the U.N. Environment Programme. In this case it was the annual presentation that the UNEP Paris office makes to a large collection of industry association executives. It was at this same meeting three years ago that we first forged the partnership that led to the Global Reporting Initiative and it is amazing to look back and see how far we have come.
This is the third time I have attended this event, and the first two taught me a good deal about how industry associations work. Though the people are often pleasant and intelligent, they are structurally hindered by the design of their own organizations from thinking creatively about the future. Industry associations are, for the most part, defensive structures, designed to protect their members from change. Industry association executives must constantly take into account how all of their members will react, including the slowest, most recalcitrant performers. So when a new idea emerges -- a new technology, a new law, a new development in international trade -- industry associations are often the first and the loudest to say that it will be bad for their members.
That being said, industry associations are also important mechanisms through which information can be distributed, which is why UNEP is so careful to brief them on what is happening and why the association executives come. There are a few international business associations -- Business for Social Responsibility, the Prince of Wales Business Council, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development -- that have taken a more proactive and positive role. And when I look back over the last three years, I have seen a significant shift in the tone of the meetings. Three years ago, when I raised the question of building consensus on reporting, the response at the Paris meeting ranged from curious to hostile. Last year when I made a presentation on the GRI, the comments signaled a kind of grudging resignation. "How soon do you think this will be mandatory?" was the first question I received. This year almost all the speakers have referred to the GRI in a tone that implies this is a positive and permanent part of the world scene. Some people are even excited about it and came up to me and to others with offers of help. I think that people's concern about issues like climate change has also risen; it is almost impossible for anyone to say, as they more or less did three years ago, that this was the figment of some hysterical environmentalist's imagination.
I am writing this segment of the diary in the late afternoon on the train from Paris to London. The impeccable farming country of northern France is racing past my window, leading me to ponder, once again, the idiocy of America's abandonment of railroads. In a few minutes we will dart through the Chunnel and appear in England. This is only the second time that I have been through the Chunnel, and it still amazes me that one can take a train under the expanse of water that separated England and the continent for so many centuries.
(We have just popped into the dark of the tunnel.)
It also amazes me that I can use this six-pound piece of plastic to communicate with and to gather information about almost anyone. Indeed, this morning I spent a few minutes on the Internet collecting articles by and about Sir Geoffrey Chandler, the head of the business unit of Amnesty International in the UK with whom I am having dinner tonight. I have never met him before, but I've heard that he has a strong interest in human rights reporting by companies. I found one article by him that suggests there is important convergence in our views.
"The market only works effectively on what is measured," he wrote. "Since at present this is only money, the market is essentially short term in its impact. If we had comparable standards for the measurement of the quality and development of the human resource, something of far more importance to the long-term success of the company, if we had measurement of the environmental and social impact, the market would operate on a different time-scale."
This is another example of how the same idea is popping up everywhere at once. The real challenge is to figure out how all the people who are saying it can work together to make it a reality.
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