ISO 26000 Social Responsibility Guidance Standard
By Ira Feldman, immediate past chair of the ABA/SEER Sustainable Development, Ecosystems and Climate Change committee. Mr. Feldman is president and senior counsel of Greentrack Strategies (ira at greentrack.com) and currently serves as U.S. expert to the ISO 26000 process.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a fairly well-established concept, with a vast if inconsistent literature developing over the last 15 years. As applied to corporate entities, CSR suggests that organizations can do well by doing good, but there is no single commonly accepted definition. Most would agree that CSR implies something more than corporate philanthropy, and usually refers to a bundling of substantive efforts in the areas of the environment, human rights and labor. For many, the scope of CSR is co-extensive and interchangeable with the "people, planet, profits" mantra of sustainable business practices; others would argue that CSR is closely related to sustainability, but steers clear of the financial viability of the organization that is accepted in "triple bottom line" sustainability thinking.

Numerous voluntary codes and standards already are available dealing with various slices of the CSR pie. Among these are the principles set forth by the UN Global Compact and in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development guidelines; the workplace rights and sustainability guidelines found in the SA 8000 and AA 1000 standards; and the reporting protocol developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) stepped into the CSR arena in 2002 by forming a strategic advisory group to consider whether ISO should develop a CSR standard. Instead of harmonizing the definitional morass, ISO has further clouded the picture by declaring that its initiative will focus on "social responsibility"—CSR without the "C"—as a signal that the ISO 26000 guidance will address the social responsibility of all organizations, not just business corporations. ISO's stated objective for its new guidance standard is to provide practical guidance related to operationalizing social responsibility, identifying and engaging with stakeholders, and enhancing the credibility of reports and claims made about social responsibility.

Nearly 400 experts from over 60 countries and liaison groups have been involved in the ISO/SR process, which is unique in the history of ISO activities in that six stakeholder categories (industry, government, NGO, consumer, labor, and others) were designated to encourage a multi-stakeholder process. ISO has convened four international meetings in the process to date: Bahia, Bangkok, and Lisbon, with the fourth round just completed in Sydney in late January 2007. It was only recently, however, in October 2006, that a working draft (Working Draft 2) emerged from the various drafting groups with sufficient content to discern the likely component pieces of the final product.

In the current draft of ISO 26000, roughly the first third of the document attempts to place the social responsibility concept for organizations in broader context; for a document created by committee, the current working draft does a surprisingly good job of laying out the background and a range of considerations in a manner that is accessible to a newcomer to the field.

The second third of the document identifies key SR principles and then outlines the seven "core" topic areas, which have, for now, been selected for inclusion in the guidance by consensus. These topics, still subject to change, are: organizational governance; environment; human rights; labor practices; fair operating practices; consumer issues; and community involvement/society development. This middle section reads more like a succession of lists rather than an integrated text, and this is understandable for an early draft. The framework adopted in this section shows promise for introducing the user to the key substantive areas by explaining the relevance of each topic to SR rather than attempting an encyclopedic approach.

The final third of the draft document is devoted to operationalizing an SR program. This section is viewed by many as the weakest of the current draft, as debates over the use of illustrative examples and reference to management systems approaches remain unresolved. The language in this section relating to communicating with stakeholders, while coherent, will likely be scaled back to better fit the full text.

There is a long way to go before ISO 26000 is released as an international standard in late 2008 or early 2009. Almost two years into the process there are some fundamental issues still on the table, including whether to embrace sustainability terminology per se in this SR document; how to acknowledge the various existing standards and protocols (such as the Global Compact, AA 1000, SA 8000, and GRI) that fall within the scope of ISO 26000; and, whether to utilize illustrative examples or refer to "best practices."

What is clear at this stage is what ISO 26000 is not intended to be. It is not to be a "management systems standard" (MSS) in the "Plan, Do, Check, Act" Deming model. Rather, organizations are expected to use existing management systems (ISO 9001, 14001, etc.) to implement their SR programs. It is not to be a certification standard like ISO 14001, i.e. there will be no third party registration—it is a guidance standard only. Finally, the drafters are not to create a set of social obligations or expectations of the type properly defined by governments. But major as-yet-unresolved questions remain as to whether the implementation section of the draft too closely resembles a management system, and whether the substantive principles outlined in the text (e.g., "Organizations should not employ children nor practice any form of forced labor") cross the boundary drawn on obligations.

NOTE: This update is excerpted from an earlier article which first appeared in the Sustainable Development, Ecosystems and Climate Change Committee Newsletter, Vol. 10, No. 1, December 2006, Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, American Bar Association.