Human Rights & Social Impact

Human Rights & Social Impact Services

Our recommendations align with the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, ILO Fundamental Conventions, OECD Due Diligence Guidance and Guidelines, the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Social Transformation Framework, and Just Transition Initiative.

Empower your organisation to realise the business value of social performance by leveraging our Social Impact and Human Rights Services.  From human rights due diligence and social impact assessment to ethical trade and just transition, our services empower organisations to thrive while contributing to a world where ethical values and social responsibility take centre stage.

Strategy Development & Advisory

Companies and investors face growing expectations to show how they identify and address their human rights impacts. The regulatory landscape and reporting requirements on modern slavery and human rights and environmental due diligence, among others, are continuously evolving. Meanwhile, civil society and consumers increasingly scrutinise companies’ reporting on positive social impacts.

Drawing on our backgrounds in human rights law, advocacy and compliance, we work closely with leading companies and investors to design and implement tailored human rights policies and strategies aligned with leading international frameworks. We work continuously with clients to help them implement their social impact and human rights strategy and stay in front of emerging risks in their operations and value chains.

Human Rights Risk & Impact Assessments

Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (UNGPs), companies are obliged to “know and show” how they address human rights impacts, to ensure transparency and accountability to stakeholders. Many firms are also subject to evolving regulatory requirements for companies to report on how they conduct human rights due diligence.

Our Human Rights practice assembles industry-leading multilingual project teams to conduct on-the-ground field research for investors and companies on their human rights impacts. Stakeholder engagement is at the heart of our approach, combining meaningful consultation with workers, communities and other affected rightsholders with commentary from local and regional experts, and in-depth public domain research.

Social Impact Assessment and Measurement

Regulatory compliance, risk management, stakeholder engagement, and corporate responsibility increasingly mandate and expect companies to demonstrate they are meeting certain social standards, anticipating and mitigating negative social consequences and improving their social performance in line with environmental and economic considerations. We help clients establish measurement and monitoring frameworks to measure, manage, and improve social performance of their services, products, policies, and programs.

With expertise in community engagement, resource management, human rights, social compliance, and monitoring and evaluation, our diverse team works closely with clients to tailor social assessment and measurement to their needs, whether it is at a corporate level, for a specific product, service, and/or for all or part of their supply chain. We work in partnership with clients so that social indicators assessed are in line with their corporate strategy and can be monitored and managed during current state and in the future.

Just Transition

We support organisations to integrate a just transition in their decarbonisation journey. We do this by helping to prioritise stakeholders that are most affected by the transition to a low-carbon economy, create decent work opportunities, identify opportunities for public-private collaboration and leave no one behind.

We can help integrate a just transition into our clients’ sustainability commitments, policies and practices, bridging the various agendas that exist at the nexus of environmental sustainability and social justice and impact.

Supply Chain Due Diligence & Responsible Sourcing

Regulations increasingly mandate supply chain due diligence, with increased scrutiny on human rights risks beyond first tier suppliers. We help clients proactively manage potential and actual adverse human rights impacts throughout their supply chain and develop approaches to engage with high-risk suppliers globally.

Our approach ensures that a business has a due diligence policy and practices based on international best practices and guiding principles (OECD, UNGPs) and implements these in their supply chains. We then enable businesses to understand how they will enact and embed the diligence.

Responsible Investment

Leading investors are increasingly going beyond analysing financially material risks in their portfolios, to assess their most salient human rights risks – those that present the most severe potential impact to people.

We leverage our experience in assessing human rights risks for corporates and our regional expertise to help investors screen portfolios for their highest risk assets. We also help investors get ahead of human rights issues pre-transaction including in the supply chain, spotlighting high risk sectors and regions and providing tailored analysis on critical issues. We bring a human rights lens to environmental & social due diligence, analysing risks based on gold standard frameworks such as the IFC Performance Standards as well as the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (UNGPs).