Corporate Environmental Responsibility : The UNEP Experience

Published in 2005, this chapter provides a perspective from UNEP on corporate social responsibility, focusing on voluntary action to promote the environmental and overall sustainability performance of companies.

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Voluntary Industy Codes of Conduct for the Environment

A step-by-step process for developing effective voluntary initiatives would involve gathering information; undertaking preliminary discussion with major stakeholders; create a working group; prepare a preliminary draft of the code; consult on the preliminary draft; publish and disseminate the code; implement the code and review the code. Experience with these initiatives has shown the following aspects are needed to make them effective:

• Commitment. There is a need to establish a clear sense of purpose, reasons to implement the code and the involvement of internal and external stakeholders.
  
  
• Content. There is a need to take a triple-bottom-line approach and to include key management elements.
  
  
• Collaboration. Associations can help with general dissemination, providing guidelines on management and use of tools, peer support and networking.
  
  
• Checking. This is used to review awareness and to monitor implementation and results.
  
  
• Communication. There is a need to listen to the public and to communicate implementation and results.

See: DTIE (Division of Technology, Industry and Economics), Voluntary Industry Codes of Conduct for the Environment (Technical Report 40; Paris:DTIE, United Nations Environmental Programme [UNEP], 1998).

Voluntary Initiatives: Current Status, Lessons Learnt and Next Steps

This paper is organised around the five major types of voluntary initiatives and draws on the presentations and discussions from a UNEP Voluntary Initiatives Workshop held in September 2000. It summaries the key messages and outlines possible next steps to improve the efficacy and credibility of voluntary initiatives in today's context of globalisation.

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Encouraging Voluntary Initiatives for Corporate Greening

This paper maintains that none of the usual options - the market, conventional regulatory authority and customary propriety - can meet the challenge of moving toward sustainability in a dynamic, globalising political economy. At least they cannot do so as usually applied and haphazardly associated. Efforts to build a coherent and well-integrated set of motivations for "voluntary initiatives" are unlikely to be sufficient by themselves either. Thus, the paper argues, the exercise of building such a set of motivations along with appropriate individual initiatives is necessary, globally as well as nationally.

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