The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development, Surya Deva, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in New York and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) co-organised a side event to discuss the role of businesses in contributing to inclusive and sustainable development (full programme).
Speacking on behalf of the Women’s Major Group (WMG), Barbara Adams (GPF) spoke about human rights as an accountability mechanism, the need to differentiate the various stakeholders and dangers of “outsourcing accountability”, and the deficiencies of GDP as the sole measure of development. Watch her presentation below.
“I’ve been a fan of the Right to Development for a long long time and I’ve certainly got my fingers crossed for the next iteration that we’re embarking on towards a convention. I can think of nothing better to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the universal Declaration of Human Rights it means we’ve got a heck of a lot of work on our plate over the next couple of months. If that’s the case, I’m here with Women’s Major Group and I think a number of people might know the Women’s Major Group – it came together as major groups did in 1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development and is a a very active organization committed to women’s rights, gender equality in all facets of the policy area, a number of which have been managed today. It is active also in various dimensions to do with today’s topic, for example, participated actively with the UN Women Generation Equality formulation and is very supportive of the binding treaty with regard to business and human rights and very active with regard to that in the work that’s taking place in Geneva.
The Women’s Major Group primarily is very concerned that there is more action and more results with regard to what you mentioned in your introduction – business adherence to all human rights and labor standards. I think one of the tensions that is there is how we go about that there’s been a recognition that states are duty-bearers, but most most of the initiatives that we hear and are described are basically voluntary; that’s not really in the concept frankly of Human Rights. Human Rights as a concept is different from codes of conduct and different from partnerships and different from multi-stakeholder initiatives, and so on, because it has a grievance mechanism. It isn’t guidelines; due diligence isn’t guidelines. Codes of conduct help, but without any kind of compliance or independent monitoring, it’s not clear whether we’re going forward frankly, or just making noise with regard to them. We need to see more on issues to do with liability, we need to see more with regard to code of conflict issues in that particular area.
The other thing that is very much the case is this whole question of civic space and public information, because basically we don’t have the same access to public information for businesses that have commercial protections, and so these are the kinds of areas that one feels need a lot more attention, work. What I’m getting at here are concerns about accountability; there are different accountability tracks. Yes, the states are the duty-bearers, but we sort of ignore how much influence business and commercial enterprises, especially the very large ones, actually influence the outcome of state deliberations. Influence lobbying – I worked for the UN for a long time and the part of where I worked received some financial contributions from large transnational corporations which frankly was a fraction of what that same TNC was contributing in their lobbying budget, so I think there’s a lot more unpacking that would be extremely helpful.
With regard to how to make this real, the other track this takes us to very quickly is this whole concept of stakeholders. The concept of stakeholders has been moving forward as replacing what used to be called non-governmental players. But if we look at it more closely, stakeholders is a collection of diverse parts of society. We’ve heard already about small and medium enterprises, for example. We might we find that we have academia, and there we have a whole range and within that the accountability of some of the stakeholders you mentioned – the business round table and the move to stakeholder capitalism from shareholder capitalism – a recognition that there are responsibilities to more sectors of society, but still needing to be accountable through the market. Yet Civil Society Organizations and women’s rights organizations are looking for accountability to Human Rights and not through the market. Yes, the market can help, but basically, the whole concept of Human Rights is you can’t buy them on the market. That is why we have a concept of Human Rights. So I think there’s a real danger that we could be outsourcing accountability; frankly, if we keep developing this stakeholder concept without differentiation within the stakeholder concept, and without different approaches to the accountability of the different stakeholders. Now, if you actually look at the UN, you will see that non-governmental organizations, basically nonprofit organizations including business associations, have to go through a very rigorous process approved by a committee of the Economic and Social Council to actually get that status. We are not seeing the same for the other stakeholders; that isn’t the way it’s working. We have very big differentiation on access, partly by size but more than that. So I think when we look at the stakeholder concept here, we really need to align it, if I might put it like that, with the concept of Human Rights because I think it’s actually evading human rights rather than supporting it.
The last comment I would make here as a question: there was a reference in the SDG Political Declaration [about] going Beyond GDP. There is a lot of work taking place in the UN and I know that the expert mechanism on the Right to Development also looked at work to do with Beyond GDP. GDP, which is the main measure of progress across a range of areas, is not a neutral concept; GDP invisiblizes the care economy. GDP reduces the informal economies’ contributions to countries, most of which are developing countries but not exclusively, and where women are mainly employed. GDP discriminates against the public sector because GDP just adds up economic activity, so if you’re higher paid, you contribute more to GDP. There’s a lot of work taking place with regard to going Beyond GDP. I came from another meeting this morning on the same topic and I think that if we’re talking about the Right to Development and the responsibilities and how to engage with business, we really need to also look at what happens, how we move with this Beyond GDP conversation.”