Socially responsible market: from challenge to reality


The four-day long 2008 Ethos International Conference gathered 2,500 people at the Anhembi Convention Center, in São Paulo, including attendees and lecturers, journalists, guests and visitors to the Sustainable Technology Showcase and the exhibition on 10 years of the CSR movement. After four roundtables, eight panels, six workshops and several simultaneous activities, we are sure this year’s theme – “Socially Responsible Market: a New Development Ethics” – was supported by everyone who walked around the rooms and halls of Anhembi. “People are no longer wondering whether a company should be sustainable or not. They are demanding the tasks the company should perform,” says Ricardo Young, president of the Ethos Institute. “The Conference showed that the market wants to enable large-scale actions to meet the social responsibility challenge.”

According to Paulo Itacarambi, executive vice-president of the Ethos Institute, this shows the evolution of Ethos and the social responsibility movement in Brazil. In the first years of the institute, the objective was to sensitize and mobilize companies for social responsibility. Then came the phase of helping companies to manage their business in a responsible manner, providing them with assessment and management tools, such as the Ethos Indicators on Corporate Social Responsibility. Now it is time to make the corporate practices move beyond the companies’ borders. “The focus of our work today is making the companies partners in the construction of a sustainable society,” says Itacarambi.

One of the novelties of the International Conference in its tenth year is that it has not finished after its four days of activities. The six workshops had the mission of gathering proposals for companies to actively participate in the construction of a sustainable market (and society). The proposals will be available for reference on the Ethos Institute website. Anyone else will be allowed to submit his/her proposal on the website. In addition, there will be meetings with representatives of member companies in several Brazilian states to collect new suggestions. At the end of the year, the Ethos Institute will hand to Brazilian officials, in the various government spheres, a document with the consolidation of these proposals, which may be used as a basis for public policy. See below some of the proposals made in the conference, broken down into three themes: self-regulation and market practices; regulation; and governmental actions.

 

Self-regulation and market practices

•    Linking electoral campaigns funding to the establishment of public management targets and indicators;

•    Creating corruption (bribery, fraud, etc.) reporting channels that protect the author’s anonymity;

•    Producing and disclosing sectoral studies of social and environmental impacts, identifying critical variables by sector and area and monitoring companies and society;

•    Setting a common agenda for large companies of the same sector and area to address the most relevant social and environmental critical variable in their production chains;

•    Developing agreements between companies and solidary economy organizations in the marketing process to foster sustainability of local communities;

•    Setting criteria for consumers to identify social and environmental indices of companies and products through labels and packaging;

•    Creating and promoting reverse processes as business opportunities;

•    Setting good working conditions parameters for outsourced service providers, making them co-responsible.

 

Regulation

•    Regulating public funding by demanding the analysis of social and environmental impacts in the borrower’s production chain and requiring, in exchange, capacity-building and training programs for suppliers.

•    Establishing mandatory disclosure of targets and indicators for the public management (health, education, transport, etc.);

•    Creating policies to encourage reuse of obsolete products (computers, cell phones, etc.);

•     Regulating the participation of solidary enterprises in public procurement;

•    Creating an act to make legal entities liable for corruption, following the example of environmental crimes;

•    Regulating lobbying;

•    Creating a social and environmental liability code that enables social control through wrongdoing reporting and punishment by public organizations.

 

Governmental actions

•    Determining that state-owned companies publish sustainability reports according to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) model;

•    Creating policies for the financial system and tax mechanisms to foster the development of sustainable products and services;

•    Partnering with the private sector to develop and implement standards and certifications for sustainable products and services;

•    Implementing the Ecological and Economic Zoning (ZEE) in the states of the Amazon Region;

•    Creating credit lines suitable for solidary enterprises;

 

 

> Access here the page for submission of new proposals.
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