The Glass is Filling Up

Authors

• Linda Hwang

  Former Manager, Research, BSR

As a member of BSR’s Research & Innovation team—which frequently considers the business implications of environmental and human rights issues (as well as the intersection of the two)—I have found the ongoing debate between Fiji Water and the U.S. investigative magazine Mother Jones to be an exciting conversation.

The debate raises many questions related to the challenges of a natural resources extraction company operating as a provider of beverages, the transparency of privately held companies, and the corporate responsibility to respect human rights.

It was equally exciting for me to hear the discussion taking place at the CEO Water Mandate’s fourth working conference during the annual World Water Week meeting, which is just wrapping up in Stockholm.

As the group discussed water and human rights, two stakeholders who traditionally sit on opposite sides of a very wide table are finding their way toward the center:

Chris Jochnick, Oxfam America’s director of private sector development, told the group: “Water for the poor is less about overall quantity or scarcity, and more about access, and access has everything to do with power. In thinking about water as a human right, we have to consider not only how business initiatives impact water supply but also how they empower or dis-empower the poor.”

And from the other side of the table came a quote from Dan Bena, PepsiCo’s director of sustainable development and environmental health and safety: “We are absolutely willing, and most likely will have to, move some of our business operations out of certain water-scarce areas, even if there is great business opportunity, if the resources available don’t allow it.”

What stands out here for me is that NGOs and the private sector are starting to see eye to eye on the issue of access to water as a human right. Rather than a debate about whether access to water should be recognized as a human right, the focus has shifted to the shared understanding that many users require access to water, the availability of water cannot meet current (and possibly future) demand, and people are at the center of the debate, both in our capacity to implement strong governance systems for water resources and to ensure that those systems support individuals’ capacity to assert their rights.

NGO-private sector collaborations are not new. In the last five years, we’ve seen them in other sectors, and with other issues (McDonald’s and Greenpeace, Environmental Defense and FedEx). I applaud these developments, but I also wonder how we arrived here? Did corporations suddenly wake up one day and agree with everything NGOs were saying? Did NGOs decide they were being too hard on corporations? What can we do to encourage this kind of progress in the future?