“And” May Be the Most Important Word

Authors

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  Dunstan Allison-Hope

  Senior Advisor, BSR

  

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  Dunstan Allison-Hope

  Senior Advisor, BSR

  

  San Francisco

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  Dunstan leads BSR’s work at the intersection of technology and human rights.

  Previously, Dunstan led BSR’s information and communications technology, heavy manufacturing, and human rights teams.

  He brings significant experience working on a diverse range of engagements and issues, including human rights due diligence, privacy and freedom of expression, sustainability reporting and strategy, and stakeholder engagement.

  Dunstan facilitated the multistakeholder process of developing global principles on freedom of expression and privacy, which led to the launch of the Global Network Initiative in October 2008. He also helped create the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, a collaborative initiative of more than 100 ICT companies improving conditions in their supply chains. Dunstan participated in the process of creating the Global Reporting Initiative G3 guidelines, and he is a regular commentator on issues of corporate accountability, reporting, and human rights. He also co-authored the 2010 book Big Business, Big Responsibilities.

  Prior to joining BSR in 2004, Dunstan was part of British Telecommunications' corporate responsibility team.

  Dunstan has an M.Prof. in Sustainable Development from Forum for the Future.

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• Charlotte Bancilhon

  Former Director, Sustainability Management, BSR

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  Alessia D’Ascanio

  Manager, Transformation, BSR

  

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  Alessia D’Ascanio

  Manager, Transformation, BSR

  

  Paris

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  Alessia works with BSR member companies across industries on sustainability management, including stakeholder engagement, materiality, strategy, and reporting, among other topics. She manages BSR’s Future of Reporting collaboration, a group of companies sharing reporting best practices and tracking the regulatory landscape in the US and EU. 

  Alessia brings with her nearly 8 years of experience in sustainability reporting. Prior to joining BSR, Alessia worked in the financial services sector within sustainability teams managing the publication of sustainability reports and ranking and rating submissions. She also worked at GRI where she helped companies better understand and use the GRI Standards. 

  Alessia holds a BSc in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. A Canadian and Italian national, she speaks English, Italian and French. 

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Editor's Note: We are living through a time of profound and accelerating change. Our world has been rocked by a series of disruptions: COVID-19, war and social conflict, rollback of rights and democracy, and now high inflation and the risk of recession. These developments have jolted society and business.

To help our 300+ member companies navigate this volatile environment, we're releasing a series of blogs to build insight into how to shape business approaches that address this unique moment. Following last month’s piece on the role of business in combating societal fragmentation, today we focus on how new laws, regulations, and standards mark the beginning of a new era.

We’ll conclude with a deeper dive into how BSR’s 2025 strategy can help your company to navigate these turbulent times—and how you can collaborate with our global network to push us further, faster, to achieve a more equitable, just world for all.

The field of just and sustainable business stands at the threshold of a new era.

Governments are establishing new laws and regulations that will inevitably reshape the way companies address sustainability risks and opportunities, including how due diligence is conducted, how decisions are made, and how risks are disclosed. 

The twin EU directives on reporting and due diligence, the SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule, and revisions to Japan’s Corporate Governance Code promise to be especially influential.

Standards-setting bodies are accelerating progress toward harmonized reporting frameworks. The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) brings together standards for disclosing the impact of sustainability on enterprise value creation, while the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has integrated the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and continues to evolve sustainability standards. 

The GRI is also known for collaborating with the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) and for co-creating the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), which will become mandatory under the CSRD.

However, the dialogue about how companies can navigate this new era of decisive change often emphasizes binary choices.

Does today’s focus on “applying the standards” limit more entrepreneurial approaches to just and sustainable business? Will the emphasis on “ensuring compliance” overshadow more ambitious priorities and become a tick-box exercise? Does the instinct to cover everything listed in the new standards undermine the principle of materiality and the company’s ability to focus on what’s most important?

Rather than seeing these as “either-or” options, we believe that “and” is the most important word for this new era of just and sustainable business. 

While we recognize the obvious tensions inherent in these binary questions, we believe this can be creative rather than destructive. We encourage companies to see this new era of just and sustainable business as an opportunity to define new approaches. 

Entrepreneurship AND Standards

When BSR was founded in 1992, there were no sustainability standards, and everyone in the field needed to be an entrepreneur. We made everything up as we went along, trusting our instinct, using our values as a guide, and creating new approaches based on first principles. Thirty years later, we have standards left, right, and center, and everyone in the field has become hyper-focused on “how we apply the standard in practice.” In doing so, companies risk getting trapped in believing that there is only one “right” approach to just and sustainable business, with little innovation.

It is essential to find a final balance. We can be entrepreneurs and continue exploring ways of doing things better than before, and we need to apply standards so that we can adhere to collective expectations. Indeed, some of the best innovation happens in constrained conditions, so let’s view these new standards as helpful design constraints.

Ambition AND Compliance

Before this new era, compliance efforts made an important but somewhat limited contribution to the field, mainly showing up in labor standards, environmental management, and anti-corruption. By contrast, companies had a huge blank canvas upon which goals could be established, strategies launched, and sustainability reports written. Today, the tide of new standards and regulations raises the standard for everyone and ensures that all companies will undertake a certain amount of “just and sustainable business”—for example, the CSRD will push nearly 50,000 companies in the EU to consider sustainability as part of board discussions.

On the other hand, we fear that the focus on compliance risks is detracting from the original intention, purpose, and spirit of laws, regulations, and standards being implemented. We risk forgetting why we do what we do.

We need to have the discipline of compliance and stand up to the increased scrutiny that will accompany it, but we must also stay true to our transformative ambition and not shy away from the bold goals, innovation, and systemic change that are needed to achieve a just and sustainable world and build resilient businesses for long-term value.

Materiality AND Comparability

Over the past two decades, it has become abundantly clear that companies should focus resources on the most significant issues, no matter how materiality is defined by a company. But while the concept of materiality features prominently in the laws, regulations, and standards of the new era, we hear from BSR member companies a countervailing trend—the instinct to limit legal liability and not to be “caught out” leads to a quest for companies to cover every potential issue referenced in every law, regulation, and standard. Call it the “C.Y.A. approach” to just and sustainable business. 

We need to achieve both. BSR believes that a “comply or explain” approach to disclosure will give companies the time and space to put meaningful and rigorous policies and new systems in place for material issues.

We are struck by the sheer reach, ambition, and comprehensiveness of the laws, regulations, and standards that are a defining feature of this new era of just and sustainable business. We urge companies to pay close attention to them because they will surely transform the field of just and sustainable business, impact a company’s business strategy and day-to-day operations, and dramatically change how sustainability is governed within companies.

However, we believe that this important focus on standards, compliance, and comparability should not be accompanied by a rejection of the entrepreneurship and ambition that got us this far. We encourage companies to take creative approaches to the tensions that will undoubtedly arise and seek to achieve both the letter and the spirit of laws, regulations, and standards. 

At BSR, we are working with our member companies to map regulatory requirements and assess their preparedness. We also help our member companies develop the ambitious strategies, goals, and targets necessary for a just and sustainable future.