The Importance of Doing the Technical Work
These are disorienting times for all of us working in just and sustainable business. After two decades of progress, we are facing a backlash against the principles, assumptions, and ideals on which the field is built. We have been through tough times before, but this is an onslaught unlike anything we have previously experienced.
Whether it is the assault on civil rights and DEI in the US, the CSRD/CSDDD retreat in the EU, or the decline in investor and business participation in efforts to tackle climate change, barely a day goes by without another concerning development signaling a new threat to our goals. These attacks feel personal—and often they are, as those who are leading efforts to defend human rights online are experiencing.
I haven’t spent a lifetime promoting just and sustainable business to give up now, and I am sure you haven’t either. However, how should we respond? The field is full of people with different skills, working in various sectors, each with their own personal and professional constraints and opportunities. How do we determine our place on the battlefield and direct our energy toward defending and advancing the norms we believe in?
The attack on just and sustainable business—and on human rights, sustainable development, and social justice more broadly—clearly requires an ambitious, strategic, and well-resourced response.
Several impressive efforts are underway. In the US, PolicyLink’s Path Forward and We are the Founders set out an ambitious and uplifting vision of the future. In Europe, efforts to defend key concepts underpinning the CSRD/CSDDD have secured hard-fought gains. In philanthropy, the Unite in Advance campaign has inspired renewed solidarity across the sector. Efforts in the business sector have been more fragmented, and the defense of international rule of law, constitutional democracy, human rights, and good governance requires greater focus.
However, people working in the field of just and sustainable business are dispersed across a range of settings, and not everyone is in a position to contribute directly to these inspirational strategic efforts on a day-to-day basis. Here lies one of my key reflections from the past year: while we should all keep these strategic efforts top of mind, it is also essential to do the technical work of just and sustainable business. While chaos has been swirling around us, I have been impressed by the efforts of many in the field to continue advancing the quality, effectiveness, and impact of our work.
The regulations governing formal company disclosure have been the subject of political debate and attack. However, many have also focused on the hard work of improving the technical quality of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and on determining how to conduct meaningful, rather than performative, double materiality assessments.
Debates continue about the future of AI, such as the relationship between regulation and innovation. However, many have been developing practical approaches for how companies should assess, address, and disclose AI risks and opportunities, and to calculate and mitigate the carbon emissions associated with AI.
Arguments rage over the impact of social media on society, such as whether children should be prevented from using it. However, significant work continues to clarify what a human rights-based approach to content moderation means in practice, create international standards for digital trust and safety, and understand how to moderate content in the AI era.
The resources available to the United Nations to defend human rights are under attack, and the future of multilateralism is being questioned. However, essential work continues to examine how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) should be applied in rapidly changing industries, such as technology and defense.
While companies are facing significant pressure to retreat from all things just and sustainable business, many teams are defending the line on transparency, continuing to address human rights challenges globally, and developing strategies for decarbonization.
On their own, these efforts can sometimes feel peripheral in the face of a powerful onslaught. However, they are building the essential infrastructure for the future of just and sustainable business and represent substantial progress on important priorities. They often look beyond the constraints of the US/EU political context and adopt a more global approach.
It is clear that coordinated, strategic, and ambitious efforts are needed to defend and advance the vision of just and sustainable business. We should all do our part to support them, and they provide the essential context for all technical work. However, efforts to promote the norms of just and sustainable business will come to nothing if they don’t translate into practice, which is why it is essential to get on with the technical work as well, no matter how incidental it may feel at times.
I wrote this blog because “getting on with the technical work” has increasingly become my mantra. However, when committing words to the page, I questioned my categorization of specific efforts as either strategic or technical. In reality, technical work is not separate from strategy, but integral to it. The political context will change, and we need to be ready with technically sound methods and approaches when it does; however, our technical work is part of the political context, and doing it well is essential to the fight.