Are companies lobbying for sustainable development?

Are companies making sure that what their government  affairs people are lobbying for in national capitals reflects those same  companies' mission statements, visions and values?

It is a simple question  with layers of complex answers, and it is also an issue that is going to affect  companies more and more, in ways that the Council's Business Role Focus Area  has been exploring.

Early in the millennium,  the Council held a meeting in Washington DC of our member's government affairs executives. The majority admitted that sustainability issues were not among those they often worked on in the US Congress.

This has changed. At a similar meeting in late June, a participant said his company actually evaluates his work partly on how his efforts support the company's pursuit of sustainable development. Another participant said she always promotes her company's annual sustainability reports among  members of Congress.

Some public affairs people at the meeting said that it had been hard getting legislators in  Washington interested in sustainability issues – until recently.

Another objective of the meeting was to understand how  lobbying works in the city that is perhaps its world capital, and thus to understand how business can more effectively advocate for sustainability issues in Congress.

Some of the lobbyists invited suggested that lobbying works  best during crises, and as one put it: "Sometimes you have to borrow someone else's crisis." Another added that as sustainable development is not well understood among lawmakers, it needs constant relationship building and  educating of policy-makers, who are actually looking for guidance from business on sustainability issues and welcome bold suggestions from business.

One suggested that as current US legal statutes do not  include sustainable development principles, there is an opportunity to recommend such amendments. 

The Council invited Jonathan Halperin, SustainAbility's director of research and advocacy, to present to the meeting the findings of their just-published report:Coming in from the Cold: Public affairs and corporate responsibility (produced  with WWF and Blueprint Partners). It argues essentially that as companies work more through networks and less through hierarchies in an ever more transparent  world, it becomes ever harder to hide the ways in which companies are trying to  influence legislators, regulators and other stakeholders.
    
  And it argues that whereas the public and NGOs used to be concerned mainly with a company's direct impacts, it is "shifting to focus as much on the influence companies wield over different stakeholders."

Very few, but a growing number of, companies actually report on their public affairs work. Fourteen out of the top 50 reporting companies were doing a good job at this, SustainAbility found. The figure was up from zero in a previous survey.

In a poll that should make CEOs take notice, SustainAbility found that 65% of investors considered public affairs criteria in assessing companies and that some investors see the  issue as a strong indicator of quality of management. Yet 83% said companies were not providing enough information on public affairs activities, the poll found.

Many companies have come a long way since the days when what CEOs were preaching had little to do with  what lobbyists were fighting for in Washington, London, Paris, etc. Yet this  "transparency of influence" issue is one that is going to become more and more important to companies at every level.

It is one the Council's  Business Role Focus Area will continue to track, along with other "early  warning" issues, such as connections between sustainability mission statements and marketing and advertising practices.