The draft International Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility has gradually been taking shape over the past five years. ISO is a private nongovernmental body, headquartered in Geneva. And it is also the world’s largest developer of international standards.

The final plenary of the working group in Copenhagen yesterday marked a major milestone: agreement on a revised final draft of the guidance standard. That means that the development of the standard now moves on to the final stages of the process. The next step is to hand a revised draft to ISO’s members (standards bodies from more than 160 countries) for a two-month voting period. There can be no more than 25% of the total ISO member voting body voting ‘no’ if the standard is to be adopted and published as an international guidance standard late in 2010.

It was good news all round in Copenhagen as more than 400 delegates from over 80 countries (dubbed ‘experts’ rather than ‘representatives’ in ISO parlance) agreed on a final draft of the international guidance standard.

This post isn’t about all the good things that were agreed: the agreement of the Chinese delegation to text that everyone could live with; the resolution of concerns from participants from Gulf and Arab states about the use of the term ‘sexual orientation’ (resolved in favour of the term ‘personal relationships’); or how the 1500 outstanding comments and 15 ‘Copenhagen Key Topics’ were satisfactorily resolved.

Instead, this post is about how the private standards-setting process of ISO 26000 has triggered heated debates, and lasting concerns, on the content of the so-called ‘precautionary approach’ and how it should be applied by organisations other than governments. And those debates and concerns raise some basic questions about how ISO’s private processes bump up against public policy and the international legal commitments of states. That, in turn, raises a whole host of issues about the state of global governance and the confused state of distinctions between ‘private’ and ‘public’ global governance.

There are two basic problems.

First, a number of government representatives came to the ISO 26000 negotiating process with worries about how the potential trade impacts of the standard could interact with their obligations under the World Trade Organization. For example, the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade requires WTO Members to use relevant international standards as a basis for national technical regulations. A technical regulation that is based on a relevant international standard and created to address a legitimate objective benefits from a ‘rebuttable presumption’ that it does not create an unnecessary obstacle to trade.

Second, some government participants have the additional concern that their position in these talks could potentially have an impact on their international legal obligations more widely, or that working group participants are effectively re-interpreting delicately balanced intergovernmental agreements. Non-governmental participants do not have to confront these issues.

In the final plenary session in Copenhagen yesterday, three participants from the so-called ‘government stakeholder group’; those participating on behalf of the governments of the United States, India and Canada; expressed their concerns with two references to the ‘precautionary approach’ in parts of the proposed new standard that set principles for organisations to apply in pursuit of social responsibility in the fields of environment and consumer issues respectively.

The positions of these three experts at the talks can in many respects be seen as an inevitable consequence of the current unjoined up link between ISO and public policy. They mean bringing the political positions of governments to a voluntary and private standard where, in contrast to intergovernmental or national policy processes, they are less likely to be negotiable. This in turn causes frustration on the part of many participants who are committed to the ISO principle of ‘consensus’ decision-making across experts, regardless of how representative they might be, or how accountable to others.

The draft social responsibility standard does not apply to governments in their capacity as policy-makers. But it addresses other kinds of ‘organisations’ of all sizes, wherever they might be found.

Yesterday, in a concluding plenary session of more than 400 participants from more than 80 countries, a representative of the US government made it clear that the US government has ‘sustained opposition’ to a key part of the 100-page text which asks organisations of all sizes to take a ‘precautionary approach’. Canada and India also expressed their concerns about the text. The three have differing views on the content of the precautionary approach and how it should be applied, at the level of principle, to organisations.

Whilst it is beyond the scope of this post to explain in any detail the precise sources of the different positions, a brief explanatory diversion is probably useful.

The precautionary approach has been developed in a series of international agreements since the 1990s. As an approach, it proposes that lack of full scientific certainty in the face of risks of serious or irreversible damage or harm to the environment or human health should not be an excuse for postponing cost-effect preventive measures. The precautionary approach has also been adapted for application by other kinds of organisations, including businesses

The idea of a ‘precautionary approach’ is a central part of international talks on the global issue of climate change; controversial in part because of the global distribution of costs and benefits of tackling climate change in line with precaution. Now, the precautionary approach has properly been included in the global guidance standard on social responsibility because it reflects the reality of good social responsibility practice in many organisations.

The concerns of the three governments whose policy positions might reasonably be assumed to lie behind the representations of the three experts are not critical to progress with the standard at this stage since voting is ultimately based on votes from standards bodies.

Governments take part in the standard-setting process along with other groups including consumers, trade unions, and non-governmental organisations in so-called ‘stakeholder groups’. However, their objections to the text are an indication of a potential mismatch between a) political positions that arise out of government policy on issues such as climate change, science-based policy, or the management of risks from genetically modified organisms in the Capitals of the three countries and b) the reality of good social responsibility practice in markets and economic sectors around the world.

As ISO’s involvement in key issues of public policy action such as human rights, environment and labour (all addressed in the draft standard) gets deeper and broader, the tensions will only get worse unless governments themselves find a way to deal with the wider implications of ISO under the WTO and in international law.

Holding back progress in the world’s largest and most inclusive social responsibility negotiation, as these and other government positions risked (but did not eventually end) doing, is not the right way forward to ensure progress with social responsibility around the world. ISO 26000 shows that not all stakeholders can properly be treated as ‘equal’ in a process that takes effect through markets, not government ratification, and that is built around the principle of consensus.

One part of the way forward should be for both ISO and governments to clarify how governments might be ‘different’ to other stakeholder representatives in future ISO talks with public policy reach.

The ISO 26000 process has internally been relatively ‘democratic’ as a hermetically sealed process; but it is one with an impact on other ‘democratic processes’ that are not yet reflexively recognised within the ISO process.

The second part of the way forward needs to be for governments to go to the WTO to find ways to reduce the impact of ISO on their ‘policy space’ at national and international levels.

The third, and potentially trickiest area for action is to find a way to ensure that, where appropriate or necessary, government participants are freed up to be able to participate genuinely as ‘experts’.

For those whose governments see them truly as representatives of governments, (irrespective of the  fiction that they participate as ‘individual experts’), there are real concerns that their positions and views in such talks potentially has an impact, through evolving international law, on the content of their governments’ international obligations as states. ISO 26000 cannot be treated as a process that is subject to the Chatham House Rule, as ISO itself would like, because for some participants the positions taken have implications for public policy and hence accountability of governments; a key element of democracy itself. 

We must hope that in the meantime ISO 26000 is adopted by ISO members over the summer, and that it begins to generate its promised positive impacts on the social responsibility practices of organisations and their contribution to sustainable development around the world.  

The event was organised by 21st Century Trust and Salzburg Global Seminar in collaboration with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and The Environment Foundation and in association with TERI’s 2009 Delhi Sustainable Development Summit.

Participants began their discussions with a visit organized by “Growth-for-All” and partners working with people resettled in Savda Ghewra, a new residential complex in the west of New Delhi, to make way for construction associated with the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Visitors spent the afternoon seeing how coordinated civil society initiatives were supplementing government resources in areas such as health and education.

Nitin Desai opened the formal part of the event, calling for a new set of global ethical principles to underpin climate negotiations. We need real international democracy, he said.

The gap between organic decision-making at the local level and ‘inorganic’ official decision-making was a theme. Kalyan Paul advised patience: “Some people sometimes feel … that all institutions should flower at the same time and create a house full of lovely aroma – but it takes time to create democratic institutions.”

For Sushma Iyengar, when pro-sustainable development practices at the local level are lost, democracy can be weakened: “We’ve all seen how communities are dependent economically on each other – for example sheep rearers and weavers. When you remove the economic interdependency it reinforces huge divisions at the community level.”

Can India’s 8% growth target be sustained alongside a commitment to democracy? India’s rapidly growing energy needs are a test-ground. Ajit Kapadia noted that: “whatever India’s road map to energy security and sustainable development, I do not believe that in a democracy it can happen without popular support and advocacy”. But there are real risks here: “India will not, as a democracy, be able to build new power plants sufficient to meet projected demand of up to 800,000 megawatts. Constructing for the capacity that will be required can only happen if this country is a dictatorship…” warned Chandra Bhushan.

Processes of economic and development change at local level need to be supported by proper appreciation of the right to be responsible oneself as a citizen. As Dr Rajendra Pachauri emphasised, concluding the discussion, leadership through lifestyle choice and modest consumption are important at every level.

You can download a full report of the meeting here

This report records discussions at a three-day seminar  held in New Delhi in February 2009. The event explored Indian perspectives on links between democracy and sustainability. It was organised by Salzburg Global Seminar and the 21st Century Trust in collaboration with The Environment Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and TERI.

Keynote speakers were Mr Nitin Desai and Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and TERI Director-General.

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