Por Jo Cofino
Amsterdam, the venue for the annual Global Reporting Initiative conference
While sustainability reporting may be a bit of a niche area, there is certainly no shortage of people who want to learn more about it.
So while the Global Reporting Initiative's (GRI) annual conference is not exactly the highlight of the annual social calendar, it is interesting to note that it has just sold out the week before it kicks off. That means that Amsterdam will be awash with 1,100 sustainability practitioners, consultants, academics and the like.
In line with the previous two years, the Guardian has been invited to present. I will be talking at two sessions on Thursday 27th, the first being the role of media in shaping the future of a transparent economy. Later that morning I will be on a panel discussing the future of stakeholder engagement using interactive technology.
At the session on the media, we will be be seeking to answer two questions: What is the role of the media in fostering transparency and accountability for sustainable development and how is it changing? Secondly, while the media encourages transparency and accountability of others, how transparent is it on its own sustainability impacts?
On the first question, it is clear the media plays a powerful role in providing information and fostering debate. The distance that needs travelling to a truly sustainable society is so immense that most people find it difficult to even get their heads around how that would look, other than returning to some pre-industrial agrarian society, which we all know is not the answer.
Giving voice to radical new ideas and starting to bring them into the mainstream debate will be critical. We don't yet have the answer, but people like Tim Jackson, in his book 'Prosperity Without Growth' is starting to move us in the right direction. Anyway, let's see what comes out of the debate.
On the second question, it would be fair to say that the media has trailed other industries in reporting on its impacts. While it has been happy to point out the failures of others, it has resisted turning the searchlight back onto its own behaviour.
While we at the Guardian like to think we have blazed a trail in this area, we are aware of how few media companies around the world have followed us down this path, although in the last few years that has started to change.
As I have mentioned in a previous blogpost, the Guardian is one of several media companies and other interested groups which are currently working on creating a GRI media sector supplement. At the heart of the debate so far is to what extent the media is unique in the sense that its core product, its content, or brainprint, is almost impossible to measure and report on because it is largely intangible.
The week after the GRI conference, the media supplement group is meeting to try to deal head-on with this thorny problem.
The Media CSR Forum in the UK did not find a satisfactory answer when it looked into this issue a couple of years ago, being unable to create a common reporting framework given the sector is so broad, incorporating as it does, everything from newspapers, radio, and TV to the internet and video games.
The hope is that the GRI team, who think we are not so far different to other industries that have cracked this problem, will help us to get us out of this particular hole. A bit later this year our ruminations will be put out to public consultation and I will obviously highlight this on our website to encourage as many responses as possible.
The other debate at the GRI conference, on the role of technology, is equally fascinating, given that it renders obsolete old forms of thinking and acting.
What I think we can all be clear on is that old-style reporting is dead, and that companies will increasingly have to accept that the future is interactive.
While many fear the walls crumbling down, there is a small but growing number of companies who are starting to engage.
The panel is being chaired by Bill Baue, Co-Director of Sea Change Media, who has just co-written a report on the subject along with Marcy Murninghan, of Harvard Kennedy School of Government in the US.
What they see ahead is a revolution in the way that companies will need to interact with their stakeholders that will transform long-held notions about the boundary of the firm, and, with that, an evolution in the concept of who is "inside" and who is "outside" the organisation.
They conclude: "If current trends continue, interactive technology and corporate accountability will evolve independently toward deeper engagement and customisation. Greater promise, however, resides in weaving the two together to mutually reinforce their common roots in engagement and interaction. The Accountability Web holds the potential to transform traditional relationships, with companies and stakeholders now collaborating to solve problems and generate constructive new ideas and solutions that neither easily could imagine on their own.
"More broadly, the convergence of concerns regarding corporate sustainability, accountability, and ethics with the rapid growth and use of interactive technologies can help to bolster existing checks and balances on companies. It can help to bind the immediate concerns of share owners and other stakeholders whose assets or welfare are at risk to the broader claims of the public interest, thereby contributing towards a rebuilding of trust in capital markets. By fostering an ethic of transparency, accountable performance, adaptation, and renewal, the Accountability Web also can play a role in connecting economic enterprise more directly with social, environmental, and moral needs in the 21st Century."
Heady stuff! With the future so rich in possibilities, I am going to start letting go of my judgement that sustainability reporting is dry and not a subject to get the juices going
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