simon zadek

The heated debate about the current state of AccountAbility surfaces the more interesting question as to the contribution it has made over the years, and what if anything can be learned from its life and times to date. As I have been involved from the ground floor, I thought I might take bash at the first question, see what other folks think, starting with the core area of social auditing.

AccountAbility’s life and times is interesting because it tracks the trajectory of the corporate responsibility movement over the last 15 years. In the early 1980s, the fracturing of the social contract symbolised by Mrs Thatcher’s destruction of the heartland of the British trade union movement and the privatisation of chunks of the UK economy underpined the need for a new deal between business and society, contextualised by globalisation, the internet, the growing importance of intangible assets and all that stuff. The New Economics Foundation, where I was working, had been working with the fair trade organisation, Traidcraft, in developing new social audit methods, and we discovered and grew a community of like-minded folks, especially Peter Pruzan from Denmark, who was working on ethical accounting, the folks from Body Shop and Ben & Jerry’s who likewise were experimenting with social auditing, but also Alice Tepper Marlin, John Elkington, Jane Nelson and others focused on social accounting to promote ethical consumerism and improved labour standards, notably in the emblematic apparel and footwear sector.

It would be sheer hubris to say this was the early stages of the corporate responsibility movement, whose history is far deeper and older than this would suggest. But it was the early stages of a contemporary version that has since spread from Beijing to Brighton, and it is reasonable to ask the question from that point of view.

AccountAbility was one of a series of organisations that drove this development. Nurtured inside the New Economics Foundation before being kicked out of the nest in the last 1990s, it was peer to an influential group of organisations created to turn a call-to-arms into a global practice, including Alice’s (now defunct) Centre for Economic Priorities (which spawned Social Accountability International), John’s SustainAbility (who allowed us to use the ‘double a’ innovation and even the same font), Business for Social Responsibility (alive and well) and Brazil’s one and only Instituto Ethos, which through the energies of its founder and first CEO, Oded Graajaw and Valdemar Oliviera Neto (“Maneto”) respectively took corporate responsibility to a new level (the cast of characters was long and I make no attempt to acknowledge them here but Maya Forstater mentions quite a few in her blog Stone Soup).

AccountAbility’s allotted role at that time in this mission-obssessed group was to advance the noble art of ‘social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting’ into the mainstream, advanced in theory by key folks such as Rob Gray, but only marginally in practice at that time by mainstream business, as witnessed by the practitioner’s essays in ‘Building Corporate Accountability: the Practice of Social and Ethical Accounting and Auditing’.

Cause and effect are historian’s toughest masters, a point I highlight in a more detailed review of my own pathway in the opening chapter of Tomorrow’s History, ‘Writing by Candlelight’. So whether AccountAbility catalyzed change or rode on its skirts is a moot point often hard to deal with scientifically. But what we do know is that huge strides have been made over the intervening period in advancing the practice of what we might today call ‘sustainability accountability, auditing and reporting’, with methods, standards, professional qualifications and in some areas the rule of law all driving the volume of practice, and in some respects the quality and its impacts. In less than two decades, the pottering side-events of Traidcraft, Body Shop and a few other unusual institutions have transformed into a global industry and practice, supported by new institutions, such as the Global Reporting Initiative, and people. AccountAbility’s contribution to this has unquestionably been crucial. Its own standard, the AA1000APS 2008, has established the core principle of accountability to stakeholders at the core of a generation of sustainability that might well otherwise have proved more managerialist in their approach. The founders of what became the Global Reporting Initiative, led by the charismatic Bob Massie, were for example hell-bent on a global environmental reporting standard until AccountAbility, with others, succeeded in broadening the scope to emcompass social aspects, and drove ‘stakeholder engagement’ into the heart of the project.

AccountAbility’s marks can be seen across a wide swath of standards developed over the period, including Transparency International’s work on corruption and the Ethical Trading Initiative’s work on labour codes in global supply chains, the financial audit community’s work on ‘non-financial standards’ (ISAE3000), and the more recent work on ISO’s SR26000, just to name a few. But beyond the formality of the world of standards, AccountAbility’s focus on the importance of embedding stakeholder engagement into businesses has been a major part of its value added. That is, its insistence over its life that the heartland of meaningful corporate responsibility is a new era of accountability to people who are impacted, rather than the ‘responsibility’ whims of over-changing CEOs and their management.

Enough for this round, more to come on “collaborative governance” in the next blog, which you can sign up for.