Provides guidance on how businesses and business schools can collaborate to co-create solutions for sustainability challenges. The toolkit and brochure feature inspiring examples of partnerships, categorized under five themes: influencing, training, collaborating, researching and consulting.

Various stakeholder groups are mounting calls for Boards of Directors to take sustainability into account while adhering to their legal duties to shareholders. This puts questions about fiduciary duty front and center. Careful legal analyses of such questions have been prepared over the past year by law firms all over the world. The collection of memoranda below will inform and enrich discussion among Board directors, and the lawyers who counsel them, about how changing circumstances near and far are affecting their ability to meet fiduciary duty requirements. 

 Prof. Robert G. Eccles and Tim Youmans of Harvard Business School have led this collaboration which included the UN Global Compact, the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Sustainable Development and PRI, Their aim was to gather legal perspectives from law firms in a wide range of countries. Each participating law firm used a standard research template developed by Linklaters in the UK to structure their respective legal memo. The legal memos are posted below with the permission of the participating firms. To further grow the research, enquiries from law firms in countries that do not already have a legal memo are welcome. If you do not see your country listed and want to know if one is being prepared, please contact Ingvild Soerensen (soerensen@unglobalcompact.org).

This webinar presents the experiences of signatories of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a groundbreaking legally binding agreement signed in May 2013 to make garment factories safe. Ensuring that workers throughout global value chains can work in safe places is an important element of supply chain sustainability. This webinar addresses how companies can work together with trade unions and governments to contribute to occupational health and safety throughout their supply chains. Representatives of major brands and global trade unions presented their experiences.

The Roadmap provides guidance for companies on how to integrate sustainability-related goals and strategies across the organization. Best practices are illustrated and the value that can be created across five stages of sustainability integration is highlighted.

Sets out a simple and thorough process for any company, but particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, to get started with identifying its potential human rights impacts on those people directly affected by its activities, and those whose lives it touches through its relationships with suppliers or other parties. It provides tools and approaches to understand what the business already does to address these impacts, and where it can improve.

Business has much to gain from more inclusive economic prosperity, through access to new markets, unleashing more innovation, and greater social stability so necessary for markets to function. Conversely, business has much to lose from an economy that fails to capitalize fully on human capital, constricts markets, and experiences sluggish demand. This working paper introduces BSR’s perspective on the business role in creating inclusive prosperity.

One of the early questions a company must answer in meeting its corporate responsibility to respect human rights is deciding how it will organize the human rights function internally to effectively drive the process of embedding respect for human (including labor) rights. This Good Practice Note surveys a number of company experiences in organizing the human rights function internally; based on those experiences, it draws out some ‘emerging good practice guidance’ for companies, highlighting a series of questions that may help inform corporate decision-making on how best to organize the human rights function.

The Business Leadership Criteria on Carbon Pricing is designed to inspire companies to reach the next level of climate performance and to advocate for a price on carbon as a necessary and effective measure to tackle the climate change challenge. The criteria comprise three overlapping dimensions: first, setting an internal carbon price; second, responsible policy advocacy; and third, communicating on progress.

Advances a common approach to corporate water disclosure that addresses the complexity and local nature of water resources.

Highlights progress by business toward jointly established guidelines for responsible, positive lobbying on climate policy.

The UN Global Compact Bulletin is designed to keep participants up to date on news, engagement opportunities, resources and events. Participants are encouraged to look to this monthly communication for important information. Please note that engagement opportunities and events are intended for Global Compact stakeholders, unless otherwise indicated. The Bulletin is published in English, French, Spanish and Chinese.

The UN Global Compact Bulletin is designed to keep participants up to date on news, engagement opportunities, resources and events. Participants are encouraged to look to this monthly communication for important information. Please note that engagement opportunities and events are intended for Global Compact stakeholders, unless otherwise indicated. The Bulletin is published in English, French, Spanish and Chinese.