So the GRI is up and running, as a separately constituted organisation with its own board of directors.
So the GRI is up and running, as a separately constituted organisation with its own board of directors. And now its updated reporting guidelines are out for external comment, the fruit of an exhaustive process in specialist working groups. They contain some welcome changes – starting to recognise customers as an important stakeholder in the business, for example. And some unwelcome changes – like relegating community engagement programmes to ‘additional’ (i.e. optional) indicator status. Some issues remain as “promises to come” – extra detail on key issues such as water and also industry specific measures. And there are some continuing lacunae – adequate measures of impact on local stakeholders, for example at country level in the developing world. The overall effect is to increase the burden on reporting companies and reduce their scope to ‘pick and mix’ by insisting on a high level of compliance with the approach before you can claim to be “following GRI guidelines”. That’s good if the top priority right now is to ensure greater consistency among those already committed to reporting. But it’s bad news if the real need is to get many more companies to take social reporting seriously. It’s crunch time – greater rigour could cause the effort to falter.
In parallel, calls for mandatory social reporting are growing. The UK Company Law Review has proposed going someway towards this. Now the European Parliament is getting in on the act, with the proposal under debate specifically naming GRI as a standard to follow. Thankfully that won’t get into European law, or at least not yet: it would be hugely damaging to force social reporting into a straight-jacket of a compliance mentality following just one model at such an infant stage of its development. But the trends and pressures are clear. Few large companies can afford to ignore the call to give a better account of their impact on society.
Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 63 – April, 2002
COMMENTS