Influencing Power - WWF UK

Influencing Power2334See, for example, Commitment 6 of theCollevecchio Declaration, signed by over100 NGOs in early 2003 and DennisPamlin (ed.), Sustainability at the Speedof Light: Opportunities and Challenges forTomorrow’s Society, WWF Sweden, 2002.www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/collevecchio_dec_0105.pdf35In research on corporate reporting itwas found that Japanese companiestend to score poorly on social issues.See SustainAbility, UNEP and Standard &Poors (2004).36In December 2004, The Corner Housebegan legal proceedings against the UKgovernment on the basis that the ExportCredits Guarantee Department (ECGD)had significantly weakened anticorruptionrules as a result of lobbyingby companies such as Airbus, BAESystems and Rolls-Royce. The claimwas that the failure to consult otherinterested organisations was a breachof basic public law standards of fairnessand the ECGD's own consultation policy.The government settled out of court,agreeing to a full public consultationon its anti-corruption rules.37Soft money involves providing supportfor political candidates through meansother than direct donations including, forexample, donations to independentpolitical committees such as 527organisations.38Center for Public Integrity.www.publicintegrity.org39‘Preliminary Report on the GlobalCompact Leaders Summit’, UN GlobalCompact Office, 2 July 2004.www.unglobalcompact.org40Katherine Griffiths (2005).41Center for Political Accountability (2005).42This point was also powerfullyunderscored at the launch of a report bythe Institute of Business Ethics which,according to the sponsor of the report,found ‘surprisingly few companies withpolicies or codes of conduct for theirlobbying activities’, Lascelles (2005).43This information was published in GE’s2005 Citizenship Report, published inMay 2005, and therefore was notincluded in the benchmark assessment.44Caulkin and Collins (2003).45SustainAbility, UNEP and Standard &Poors (2004).46Simon Zadek and Mira Merme,Redefining Materiality: Practice andPublic Policy for Effective CorporateReporting, AccountAbility, 2003.47Peng Lei, Baijin Long and Dennis Pamlin,Chinese Companies in the 21st Century:Helping or Destroying the Planet?Corporate Social Responsibility andBeyond, WWF, April 2005.48The United Nations Norms on theResponsibilities of TransnationalCorporations and Other BusinessEnterprises with Regard to HumanRights.www1.umn.edu/humanrts/links/norms-aug2003.html49See, for example, Caulkin and Collins(2003) for recommendations forgovernment and trade associations, andSustainAbility, UN Global Compact andUNEP, The 21st Century NGO: In theMarket for Change, 2003, forrecommendations on NGO accountability.50AccountAbility and UN Global Compact,Responsible Lobbying, forthcoming(September 2005).51Center for Political Accountability (2005).52Thomas L. Friedman, ‘CEO’s MIA’,New York Times, 25 May 2005.53The terms first, second and thirdgeneration CR are adaptations of thethree generations of corporatecitizenship discussed by Simon Zadek inThird Generation Corporate Citizenship:Public Policy and Business in Society,Foreign Policy Centre, 2001. A similarconcept is presented by MichaelSkapinker in his article ‘Nike Ushers in aNew Age of Corporate Responsibility’,Financial Times, 20 April 2005.54The other signatories were AWG, BAA,Cisco Systems, F&C Asset Management,John Lewis Partnership, Johnson Matthey,Scottish Power, Standard Chartered Bankand Sun Microsystems.