Human Rights, Business and Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement
Author: Karin Buhmann
Publisher:
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe role that human rights play for responsible business requires awareness among managers exercising a broad range of tasks. Human rights issues arise, for example, in relation to procurement, finance, supply chain management, stakeholder engagement and consultation, risk management, human resource management, communication, and non-financial reporting.An increasing convergence of human rights guidance for business in transnational business governance instruments around concepts applied and elaborated by the UNGPs, such as meaningful stakeholder engagement, underscores the pertinence for managers to understand and manage their human rights impacts, and to identify stakeholders from a perspective that considers those impacts and the various actors that may be involved. Stakeholder engagement is part of human rights (and wider corporate sustainability) due diligence, and meaningful engagement with affected stakeholders is a particularly important activity. In the BHR context, rights-holders (who may be or become victims) are prime stakeholders in the sense that their human rights are or can be affected by the achievement of the objectives of the organisation who causes harm to them. Some theoretical contributions and studies, including the UNGPs, acknowledge this by referring to victims as affected stakeholders. The human rights literature prefers the terms rights-holders or victim(s). In the BHR context, potential or actual victims are often employees and local communities, but any individual whose human rights can be harmed by a company's actions falls within the category. The BHR literature's deployment of the 'affected stakeholder' term can be understood as an effort to connect to managers and management scholars who are familiar with the term 'stakeholders' as referring to core actors for successful business management and risk management. The focus, however, is on stakeholders within or outside the company who may be subject to harm, such as workers or host communities for natural resource mining or minerals processing. From a human rights perspective, 'affected stakeholders' suffering business-related harm are rights-holders or victims. 'Affected stakeholders' whose human rights are at risk or adversely impacted by the business enterprise are rights-holders.To properly understand impacts and develop adequate responses, a company needs to understand the perspective of potentially affected individuals and groups. The engagement must be meaningful to (potentially) affected stakeholders/rights-holders, taking into account their diversity of interests, groupings, concerns, cultures etc. in a way that is meaningful to them. Meaningful engagement with affected stakeholders is a core source of information for enterprises to understand about their impact and its implications for those potentially or actually affected. Without such understanding, the enterprise will not be able to adequately understand its impacts in context and overlook important information to allow it to identify and manage the impacts.
