The 2016 participants of the Annual Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum. Photo credit: Andrew Rizzardi.
The Business and Human Rights program is dedicated to research, dialogue and teaching at the intersection of business and human rights. The program’s interdisciplinary projects, which draw widely upon Columbia’s faculty and resources, address cutting edge issues within business and human rights and contribute to the development and improvement of business and human rights standards, implementation, and accountability.
Contact: Joanne Bauer, program director.
Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum
The Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum is a platform for collaboration among individuals teaching business and human rights worldwide. As of 2016, the Forum consists of over 280 professors or trainers in more than 180 institutions, in 32 countries. The Forum, supported jointly by ISHR and Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute, seeks to promote and strengthen business and human rights education by fostering collaboration among its members.
The Forum hosts the following activities: an on-line discussion board, a syllabi bank, an annual members workshop, a Business and Human Rights Teaching Handbook , and occasional webinars. The Forum’s activities, resources, and governance board, as well as information on how to become a member, may be accessed here.
Business and Human Rights Clinic
The Business and Human Rights Clinic is a full-year course jointly sponsored by the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and ISHR, which brings together graduate students to work collaboratively on cutting edge topics in business and human rights. Combining seminars, guest lectures, group work, and site visits, the Clinic is an interdisciplinary space for testing innovative models of business and human rights work, carried out in partnership with NGOs and other business and human rights practitioners. The Clinic is taught by Joanne Bauer, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs, SIPA. For more on the aims of the clinic and the outcomes of the first two years see "Equipping Professionals for the Next Challenges: the Design and Results of a Multidisciplinary Business and Human Rights Clinic."
2018 – 2019: The Impact of the Bonsucro Production Standard & Certification on Human Rights in the Sugarcane Sector
Bonsucro is a multi-stakeholder initiative for the sugarcane sector dedicated to building “a sugarcane sector with thriving, sustainable producer communities and resilient, assured supply chains.” Only ten years old and tasked with addressing a high-risk sector that has been associated with environment, land, and labor rights concerns, much is at stake for Bonsucro’s efficacy as a legitimate governing force. As a member of ISEAL, Bonsucro is required to carry out regular independent impact evaluations, which are “systematic, objective and in-depth, ex post assessments of the medium or long-term effects – positive or negative, intended or unintended -- of the implementation of a standards system.” Bonsucro seeks to do so through university partnerships. This project with the SIPA Business and Human Rights Clinic represents the first such partnership. With full leeway to determine the scope and design of the evaluation, the Clinic was charged with examining whether the Bonsucro Product Standard produces intended human rights impacts – for workers and communities -- and whether it has unintended impacts.The Clinic decided to focus the study on India, the second largest sugar producer in the world, where Bonsucro had just hired its first in-country manager to launch its India Accelerator Program. The report of our findings contains recommendations that fall within three thematic areas: 1) improving verification of compliance with the Standard; 2) enhancing the human rights compatibility of the Smallholder Production Standard; and 3) promoting human rights through the platform for change.
2017 – 2018: Responsible Investment in Property and Land in Africa
The Clinic contributed to Landesa’s Responsible Investment in Land and Property (RIPL) project by testing, critiquing and refining RIPL's model investor guide in relation to Malawi. With ambitions to attract more sound investments, in 2016 Malawi passed a legislative package governing the acquisition and use of land. During a field visit to Malawi in March 2018, Clinic members conducted interviews with representatives of business, government, civil society organizations, farmers, and farmers cooperatives. With that information they developed recommendations for improving the investor guide and drafted a Malawi investor guide in which they applied the recommendations. Three of the broad recommendations are: 1) situating the steps investors must take to respect land rights in the context of expectations that investors respect all human rights; 2) incorporating an inter-sectional analysis - which includes sensitivity to women, migrants, and children - in investor's due diligence processes; and 3) tailoring the guidebooks to local investors as well as foreign investors.
2016 – 2017: Investment Chain Mapping
The Clinic continued to support IDI on investment chain mapping, working on a new set of cases in Southeast Asia and Africa. To better understand the efficacy as pressure points of certain financial actors found in the investment chains and how best to engage those actors, the Clinic also undertook a financial actors study focusing on pension funds. The questions driving the study were: How do pension fund managers understand "human rights"? How do human rights figures into investment decisions? How do fund managers get their information about human rights impacts of investee companies and how satisfied are they with that information? What if any steps do fund managers take when they learn of a human rights violation in an existing investment? How do they engage with NGOs and how do pension fund managers think that engagement can be improved?
2015 – 2016: Investment Chain Mapping
The Clinic helped to pioneer Inclusive Development International's (IDI) investment chain mapping methodology for its Follow the Money initiative by testing it across fifteen cases in four sectors (mining, real estate, energy, agriculture) on three continents (Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America). The Clinic experimented with different financial and non-financial databases and research strategies, and recommended ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness in mapping, analyzing pressure points, and creating advocacy strategies. The Clinic also traveled with IDI staff on two site visits to present their findings directly to Client communities. In this way, the Clinic helped to support communities and NGOs in the Global South to hold development finance institutions and other investors accountable for the human rights impacts of their investment and procurement decisions.
2015 Capstone Project: Effective Remedy for Corporate Human Rights Abuses
International accountability mechanisms -- those operated by multilateral development banks (MDBs) and the state-based National Contact Points mandated by the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprise -- are expected to enable remedy for people who have been harmed by business activity. Yet there is limited empirical evidence regarding whether these mechanisms provide effective remedy, as required by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). One important, yet often overlooked, measure of effective remedy is how the affected communities themselves, including both complainants and non-complainants, regard the remedy rendered.
In 2014,
ACCESS Facility commissioned a Columbia University SIPA graduate student Capstone team to research this problem. The research team identified two contexts where remedy was purportedly delivered following a mediated agreement between a company and one or more communities affected by the company’s operations and conducted field research for ten days at each site. The focus of the field research was to capture the perspectives of the mediation and the remedy of community members themselves.
The findings are presented in this report. Rather than critique a given mechanism or mediation process, the Capstone team sought to amplify the voices of the affected communities to draw general lessons about how well these processes are working, and to challenge current thinking around effective remedy.
Development Finance and Accountability Project
Now more than ever transnational business plays a critical role in determining the fate of the poor in developing countries. Leaders of developing countries increasingly look to foreign capital to lift their countries out of poverty. In Africa, the world’s largest recipient of international aid, private capital flows to the region are nearly double that of Official Development Assistance (ODA). Globally, private investment and trade to developing countries dwarf the $135 billion in ODA the developed world provides. Moreover, we are facing the biggest infrastructure boom in history, with approximately US $6-9 trillion annually dedicated to ever larger scale projects that seek to attract over $190 billion of available private capital. Once directed towards developed states and select emerging economies, infrastructure funding is increasingly slated for the Global South. While these projects have the potential to lift millions out of poverty, reports of the harmful impacts ongoing infrastructure projects have had on communities indicate that they also constitute serious threats to already marginalized peoples. Often coupled with resource extraction, the projects tend to be located in environmentally and socially sensitive areas, including on lands inhabited by indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups.
This project seeks to identify the accountability gaps in development finance and through research and multi-stakeholder dialogue address those gaps. The work focuses upon prevention of harm at the project conception stage, the reduction of harm through the project cycle, and providing effective remedy through improvements in accountability mechanisms.
Resources
- Workshop report: "The Future Development Finance and Accountability Landscape" April 21-22, 2016
- "What is Remedy for Corporate Human Rights Abuses? Listening to Community Voices: A Field Report" SIPA Capstone report, 2015, published with ACCESS Facility
- Joanne Bauer and Erinch Sahan, "Business, Development and Human Rights" in Peter Lund-Thomsen, Michael Wendelboe Hansen, and Adam Lindgreen, eds, Business and Development Studies: Issues and Perspectives, Routledge, 2020.
Corporate Structures and Human Rights
What we call “the private sector” is in fact a diverse array of companies possessing particular structures of ownership and forms of governance. Ownership often determines whose interests the business prioritizes, while governance form defines the rules that determine how decisions are made. Ownership and governance forms can and often do play a defining role in determining how well companies are set up to address a business’ responsibilities to communities, workers, and customers.
Yet the business and human rights movement has largely neglected the structure or form of companies, and has instead looked to national and international law and policy to regulate business behavior. Attention to new ownership and governance forms could help the business and human rights movement to grapple with some of the difficult questions it faces, in particular, questions surrounding the limitations around the need for a company finding a “business case” to address human rights, and whether a company can be too big to undertake the required human rights due diligence that is the movement’s touchstone for responsible conduct. One alternative corporate form that appears to be particularly relevant insofar as it is envisioned by its proponents to be scalable and transform 20th century capitalism is the benefit corporation as well as the certified B Corps.
On May 24, 2016, the Business and Human Rights Program hosted a “Roundtable Discussion on Business Structures that Prioritize Human Rights.” The Roundtable brought together twenty-three experts working to develop and promote alternative corporate forms from the fields of business and human rights, corporate governance, impact investing, and social enterprise to consider whether these alternative forms can point the way for the business and human rights movement.
Resources
- Roundtable Discussion Summary, May 24, 2016.
- Joanne Bauer and Elizabeth Umlas, "Do Benefit Corporations Respect Human Rights?" Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2017. B Lab's response. Bauer/Umlas rejoinder to B Lab.
- Joanne Bauer and Elizabeth Umlas, “Making Corporations Responsible: The Parallel Tracks of the B Corp Movement and the Business and Human Rights Movement,” Business and Society Review, Volume 122, Issue 3, Fall 2017.
- Joanne Bauer and Elizabeth Umlas, "Has Their Time Come? A Tale of Two Corporate Responsibility Movements," The CLS Blue Sky Blog, February 2, 2018
National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights
In 2013 the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights (UNWG), a special procedure of the Human Rights Council, called upon UN member states to develop National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights (NAPs). Since then the Business and Human Rights Program has been engaged in critical assessment of the prospects and needs of that effort, with special emphasis on the participation of Global South countries.
In 2013, the UNWG commissioned the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at University of Witswatersrand, the Centre for Human Rights at University of Pretoria, the Asia Business and Rule of Law Program of Singapore Management University, together with Joanne Bauer, Senior Researcher, Business and Human Rights Program, to undertake collaborative research and organize regional dialogues to elucidate the challenges and opportunities of developing NAPs from a Global South perspective. The research team, known as the CALS-SMU Coalition, produced three submissions to the UN Working Group, and worked with the UN Working Group to incorporate the findings into the UN Working Group’s Guidance Document for states. At the 2015 UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva, four members of the coalition – Joanne Bauer, Josua Loots, Bonita Meyersfeld, and Nomonde Nyembe – presented the work at a side event on NAPs.
Resources
