Contains inspiration and recommendations for Boards of Directors on adoption and oversight of corporate sustainability.

Provides practical guidance and examples to in-house counsel in their emerging role as key change agents in advancing corporate sustainability issues within their respective organizations. The Guide seeks to raise the profile of General Counsel regarding the efforts they are making, and to inspire and encourage other General Counsel and Boards, senior executives and management of their respective organizations to take action and deliver long-term value.

The responsibility to comply with all applicable local, national, regional and international laws is a central tenet of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. Yet sometimes local or national laws pose requirements that conflict with internationally recognized human rights, thereby making it difficult or impossible for business enterprises to meet their responsibility to respect human rights. The goal of this Good Practice Note is to provide business enterprises with a non-exhaustive set of good practices for addressing situations in which local or national laws appear to conflict with internationally recognized human rights.

Advances understanding of Boardroom engagement in environmental, social and governance issues and provides a roadmap for how companies can better integrate oversight of these issues into the Board agenda.

Explores how sustainability pressures are transforming the ways we all work, live, and compete. As a part of the annual study by MIT Sloan Management Review's Sustainability & Innovation project, the 2014 research focused on the critical role of sustainability collaborations that address systemic issues, and on the role of the board of directors in guiding their companies’ sustainability efforts. As a whole, the study finds progress in companies making the fundamental shift in how they organize themselves and how their boards of directors act to address the profound challenges and risks that issues of sustainability present. But it also indicates that many business leaders have some distance to go to understand that the path to sustainability success is best traveled with others.

Various stakeholder groups are mounting calls for Boards of Directors to take sustainability into account while adhering to their legal duties to shareholders. This puts questions about fiduciary duty front and center. Careful legal analyses of such questions have been prepared over the past year by law firms all over the world. The collection of memoranda below will inform and enrich discussion among Board directors, and the lawyers who counsel them, about how changing circumstances near and far are affecting their ability to meet fiduciary duty requirements. 

 Prof. Robert G. Eccles and Tim Youmans of Harvard Business School have led this collaboration which included the UN Global Compact, the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Sustainable Development and PRI, Their aim was to gather legal perspectives from law firms in a wide range of countries. Each participating law firm used a standard research template developed by Linklaters in the UK to structure their respective legal memo. The legal memos are posted below with the permission of the participating firms. To further grow the research, enquiries from law firms in countries that do not already have a legal memo are welcome. If you do not see your country listed and want to know if one is being prepared, please contact Ingvild Soerensen (soerensen@unglobalcompact.org).

This guide assists companies in identifying and assessing potential risks in their supply chain.

This resource provides an overview of how corporate citizenship links directly to three fundamental functions of boards and their directors’ duties to the companies and shareowners they serve: Protecting stakeholder rights and interests, Managing risk and, Creating long-term business value.

These Principlesserve as the global standard on worker welfare for the engineering and construction industry. They address key areas of worker vulnerability to raise standards and level the playing field so that competitiveness is not at the expense of the worker.

This resource details how to deal with humanitarian crisis as a business.

Entities, including businesses, governments and non-profits, face an evolving landscape of environmental, social and governance (ESG)-related risks that can impact their profitability, success and even survival. This guidance is designed to help risk management and sustainability practitioners apply enterprise risk management (ERM) concepts and processes to ESG-related risks.

Provides a tangible tool to guide dialogue between shareholders and investee companies about integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into executive pay.