Author: Matilda Donaldson

What is risk-based due diligence? And what is it not? Getting back to basics as part of EU Omnibus simplification.

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson

April 8, 2025

As negotiations about the best way to simplify EU sustainability legislation progress, different levels of understanding about what risk-based due diligence means in practice may disrupt efforts to find a path to legal certainty that does not undermine the objectives of the regulation.

Drawing on over a decade of experience working with business to implement due diligence, here is Shift’s view about the basics of risk-based due diligence that EU policy makers should reinforce, and not lose sight of, in the weeks and months ahead.

Risk-based due diligence is about companies directing attention to their greatest sustainability risks. This is not about companies being overly broad in what they assess. But nor does it mean requiring companies to focus their efforts on parts of their supply chain they know are not the source of real risk.

 At the core of risk-based due diligence is the idea that companies should identify and understand the most significant impacts on people and planet connected to their business. This means companies addressing the most pressing impacts particular to their operations, products or services. And company experience has shown that managing such impacts strengthens business and value chain resilience, can increase access to capital and markets, and contributes to tackling the dual challenges of climate change and inequality.

Risk-based due diligence always starts with the same simple steps. These are the same steps that companies need to take to determine the focus of reporting.

To identify impacts and make robust decisions about where to focus, companies follow these same initial steps:   

1: Identifying, based on the best available information, which areas of the company’s operations and value chain are most likely connected to the most serious impacts.

2: Understanding more about the impacts in those areas, using various sources of information to build up that picture.

3: Establishing which issues merit most urgent attention based on the relative severity and likelihood of the impacts the company has identified.

The European Sustainability Reporting Standards and the Global Reporting Initiative point to exactly the same mapping of impacts and prioritization criteria as the basis for companies to work out what to include in their disclosures. And that mapping of impacts, together with dependencies, in turn sets the reference point for any financial materiality assessment.

 In short, the same process serves all three purposes – management of risks, impact materiality and financial materiality – and the results can be built on iteratively. This means companies can streamline, and certainly not duplicate, business processes and decision-making.

Risk-based due diligence involves companies making good faith judgements based on reasonably available information. It is not about waiting for issues to materialize. But equally, it is not about burdensome entity-by-entity assessments and questionnaires in the mythical search for perfect information.  

Risk-based due diligence is about being on the front foot in managing risks. This requires companies to make use of, and where necessary seek out, sustainability intelligence relevant to their business. At Shift, we have seen businesses use several methods including country-specific impact assessments, commodity specific studies, government and academic research as well as making use of relationships with civil society and trade unions.

Many industries use collaborative efforts to gather and share information about value chain risks, including with the involvement of partners of all sizes across different stages of that chain. By now the human rights issues that are most typically material for any one sector are widely known and a point of open discussion.

Precisely because sustainability information about global value chains is increasingly prevalent, it is not necessary for companies to indiscriminately blanket business partners with entity-by-entity assessments as part of risk identification.

The objective of risk-based due diligence is to find solutions with business partners and others, informed by evidence of what works. It is not about asking companies to control risks to zero.  It is also not about policing the practice of direct partners under the pretense that they alone can solve problems.

For some issues, such as adverse impacts on the health of employees or local community members, a company may be able to adapt its own practices to address issues alone, even fully preventing or bringing impacts to an end. However, when risks are systemic or deep in value chains, companies need to work with others via collaborative industry efforts that pool resources, implement targeted capacity-building or tackle issues in partnership with trade unions, civil society and governments. In these situations, a company cannot be expected to control impacts on people and planet, and related business risks, to zero.  What is reasonable to expect is that companies deploy credible mitigation strategies, monitor the effectiveness of the actions taken and adapt as necessary.

Deploying robust mitigations is very different from off-loading requirements onto first tier business partners, requiring them to cascade those requirements onto their own partners in turn and then remote policing of compliance. Instead, it’s about collaborative approaches that meet mutual needs and provide shared benefits in helping suppliers ensure decent conditions and fair wages for their workers.

Delivering legal certainty without unintended consequences

Companies’ legal counsels, compliance teams and executives clearly feel uncertain about how compliance with EU sustainability legislation will be judged. But certainty will not come from regulators setting arbitrary limits on where companies should look for risks then layering on confusing exceptions alongside over-prescribing what types of information companies can use. 

Reducing sustainability due diligence within EU regulation to a set of “one size fits all” procedural rules and tick-box exercises will achieve little more than wasting resources by focusing companies where they are least needed. It will leave companies exposed more generally to legal and other consequences around the world because they have not identifed the risks that matter most, and which other governments and national legislation in countries, including the United States, are asking them to address.  

Achieving simplification without compromising the objectives of EU regulation is not a straightforward task and will demand a mix of measures including providing more certainty in the legal text, delivering guidance on the first steps of due diligence as soon as possible; and specifying that administrative supervision should be used to incentivise better compliance over time.

Getting back to the basics of risk-based due diligence will ensure policy makers are off to the right start.

By Mark Hodge

Effective risk-based due diligence is key to reducing inequality and restoring the stable environment companies need to compete.

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson

March 20, 2025

The European Commission has sought to frame its ‘Omnibus Simplification Package’ as the means to help EU companies compete in the global economy by reducing the regulatory burden on them at home. Yet, as Shift has pointed out elsewhere, the Commission’s proposal would in fact be an own goal. The proposed changes to two key laws – the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) – would create administrative burden while preventing companies from meeting their own interests in managing sustainability risks.

But the Commission’s technical proposals also miss the bigger political point: that the core content of the original legislation, properly understood, responds to the outcry from electorates across Europe against rising inequalities. As such, it is not simply dispensable. By undermining the legislation’s ability to meet widespread demands for action on inequalities, the Commission’s proposals would fuel the growing social backlash, political volatility and economic instability – all of which are deeply damaging to business interests. Without addressing inequality and its consequences, talk about competitiveness is pointless.

For companies to play their part in reversing this trend of widening inequality, they need the freedom to conduct risk-based due diligence. It is risk-based due diligence that enables companies to focus their resources on those parts of their operations and value chains where the risks to people (and planet) – and related risks to their business – are greatest. It is arguably the primary means through which companies and investors can help secure what they need for the long term: to bring capitalism back within the bounds of shared social norms that support human dignity; to rebuild popular confidence in the systems of democracy and market economics; and ultimately to restore social and economic stability.

Growing inequalities impact everyone

While income inequalities have declined in many of the newer EU member states since 2007, in most of the older member states they have continued to widen, mirroring trends in other parts of the world. Wealth inequality has also increased in many EU states. 2024 reports show the wealthiest 10% of adults in the region owned 67% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% own just 1.2%. The majority of states – including France, Sweden, the Netherlands and even Germany – have seen a decline in the middle class due to people sliding down the economic ladder.

History shows us that when income and wealth inequalities follow these patterns, we should expect growing populism, nationalism, protectionism and xenophobia to come close on their heels – and violence and economic crisis may follow. We need only look around us to see this starting to play out in real time.

The sentiment animating populations is one of unfairness in the face of political and economic systems they see as rigged in favor of elites, preventing them from progressing on their own merits. Surveys have shown two-thirds of respondents in major EU economies agreeing that “the main divide in our society is between ordinary citizens and the political and economic elite”.

Although some European states have relatively strong social safety nets, these are no protection from this social and political backlash. It is not the redistribution of wealth by governments that people are looking for – it is the dignity they are afforded in the first place through decent jobs and respect for their voice, their rights and their interests in the ways that business and finance (as well as governments) affect their lives. The rallying cry of the ‘gilets jaunes’ protestors in France – a state with a strong safety net, yet where objections to globalization have exceeded those in the US – was ‘dignity for all’.

This, then, is the bigger policy context in which any response to EU sustainability  legislation takes place: a crisis of inequalities that is the aggregate effect of business practices that externalize costs and risks onto the most vulnerable workers and communities, depriving them of decency in their jobs and undermining dignity in their lives. All of this is incentivized by market philosophies that under-regulate such practices and prize financial returns above all else.

The CSDDD’s core social proposition – that companies should understand and address the greatest risks to people’s dignity that are connected with their business – is a direct response to the reality that grave inequalities are detrimental to both markets and societies. It was this understanding that animated the development of the international standards on human rights due diligence in the first place.  As John Ruggie, the author of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, stated in his 2008 report to the UN: “…markets work optimally only if they are embedded within rules, customs and institutions. Markets themselves require these to survive and thrive, while society needs them to manage the adverse effects of market dynamics…”  

European companies do need to be able to compete globally. But they cannot do so without the social and economic stability that right now depends on urgent action to reduce inequalities. And to achieve this, companies must play their part through the risk-based due diligence needed to identify and address the business practices in their value chains that are most harmful to people’s dignity. European leaders should reject those Omnibus proposals that would remove companies’ ability to meet this imperative.

By Caroline Rees

The European Commission’s ‘Omnibus Simplification Proposal’: Shift’s Initial Reflections

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson

06 March 2025

The European Commission has launched its Omnibus Simplification Proposal to address concerns about sustainability regulations in the EU. But measured by its own objectives of simplifying requirements and reducing burdens on smaller companies, the proposals are a remarkable own goal. Negotiations in the coming months must be grounded in a practical grasp of what actually works in sustainability due diligence and reporting, if the final package is to make sense.

Why are we here?

It is not surprising that the current landscape of EU sustainability regulations has been critiqued as complex and burdensome. That is the natural consequence of developing sustainability regulations in the reverse order to what logic dictates.

The commonsense sequence would have been to set out what companies generally need to do in terms of sustainability due diligence, then what they need to report about those efforts, and finally what their investors need to report about the sustainability of their portfolios. But the EU went about it the opposite way: first setting requirements for investors under the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), then reporting requirements for their portfolio companies under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), and finally the due diligence conduct requirements under the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). As a result, the connecting logic between each expectation and the next is lost, where they could have been streamlined, explained and cross-referenced.

As it is, with the CSRD and CSDDD coming from different parts of the Commission on disconnected timelines, there has been no clarity for companies that both sets of expectations are grounded in the same international standards on responsible business conduct: standards that thousands of businesses have been working to implement for nearly 15 years. And for companies new to risk-based due diligence, there has been a failure to explain what it is about: that it precisely relieves companies of the burden of blanketing their direct business relationships with excessive audits and information demands, and instead affords them the agency to address the most significant risks that are particular to their operations and value chains, and therefore central to their success. It is risk-based due diligence that delivers on the ultimate purpose of the EU legislation: improved human rights and environmental outcomes.

These disconnects in the Commission’s approach have been, somewhat understandably, mirrored in many company responses – and at notable cost.  Companies’ financial departments set about interpreting and applying the ESRS in their reporting processes, after which legal divisions began preparing to implement the CSDDD – often assuming this was distinct from reporting. While the internal controls and subject matter capabilities needed for both are essentially the same, legal and financial departments have often hired separate teams to support their work – sometimes funding this by firing the very sustainability staff who have real experience of dealing with the issues. Other companies have paid excessive amounts for external consultants, who have too often pitched over-complex solutions, and failed to reflect how the new requirements inter-relate.

What is being proposed?

The Commission had an opportunity in its Omnibus proposal to focus on the guidance needed to strip away the appearance of complexity and show what straightforward implementation of sustainability due diligence and reporting entails. For sure it requires work to put into practice. But conceptually, it’s not rocket science. But instead, the Commission’s Omnibus Simplification Proposal is an own goal. It would actually make life more complicated for both large and small companies.

The proposal would make it much harder for companies to ‘know and show’ that they are managing the risks they face, and leave them on the back foot when ‘named and shamed’ by the media and NGOs as things go wrong.

Proposed changes would ask companies to do risk-based due diligence, but then constrain their proactive efforts to their first tier business partners, which is typically not where the greatest risks reside. It would then make it harder to understand what is happening even within that first tier by allowing them to ask only their largest business partners for the very information that is needed to actually manage the risks.

The risks we are talking about are real: they will not be reduced by restricting companies’ efforts to identify, assess and address them.It is precisely risk-based due diligence that enables a cost-effective focus on where the most severe problems lie – not the proposal’s push towards entity-by-entity audits and assessments that don’t get the job done.

The Commission’s proposal risks creating burdens for SMEs – rather than lessening them, as intended.

Companies will now have to rely even more heavily on demanding that their first-tier business partners ‘pass back’ requirements to meet the company’s Code of Conduct to the next tier, with less freedom to engage directly in finding solutions. Risk-based due diligence enables companies to allocate resources to the most severe risks in their value chain and support solutions with targeted capacity-building, collaborative efforts that pool resources, and mutual responsibility with suppliers – for instance recognizing how a company’s own purchasing practices affect suppliers’ ability to manage risks. It’s the off-loading of requirements and remote policing of compliance that creates the primary burden on smaller companies. It’s also a poor use of resources for the businesses that do it.

The proposed changes to the CSRD will also perpetuate the complex set of data demands from financiers and others that the CSRD sought to reduce.

The Commission proposes to cut by 80% the number of companies that would have had to report against the ESRS, reducing their disclosures to highly generalized information, at most. It would then cut swaths of disclosures currently included in the ESRS for the remaining 20%. As a result, investors and lenders who have no option but to be on top of the underlying risks, and have long called for this information to be routinely available, will be compelled to keep peppering investees with their own information requests.

What next?

As we head into a new process of negotiation between Commission, Parliament and Council over the legislative changes, there needs to be a much more pragmatic grasp on what actually works.

While this process plays out, companies can take comfort in the fact that the international standards – the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises – spell out what it takes to do effective risk-based due diligence. This is still what the EU regulations refer to as their common underpinning – even if the latest proposals would make it harder for companies to deliver in practice. Moreover there are already years of experience in what it takes to implement sustainability due diligence and reporting in line with the international standards, and in ways that are both workable for business and beneficial for people and planet.

Every industry has companies experienced in implementing risk-based due diligence, and many industries have worked with stakeholders to develop guidance on how to do it well. EU governments already have action plans that call for companies to implement sustainability due diligence, and they receive complaints through their OECD National Contact Points where companies allegedly fail to do so. And investors and lenders will continue to raise these same expectations in their engagements with companies, as will trade unions and NGOs. In short, doing due diligence in line with the international standards remains the best investment that companies can make to be prepared to meet current and future demands.

As for the forthcoming Omnibus process, while simplification remains a reasonable goal for negotiators to pursue, the Commission’s proposals are not the answer. Instead, they represent a remarkable own goal. As the process moves forward, we must do better.

Note: Our preliminary observations on the Omnibus Simplification Proposal address just some of the counter-productive elements in what the Commission has put forward. Over the coming weeks, Shift will be issuing a series of reflections regarding these and other aspects of the proposal – including the mixed messages it sends about key due diligence steps, the removal of a uniform approach to civil liability, the proposition to focus ESRS disclosure requirements on quantitative rather than qualitative information, and other implications for interoperability with other reporting standards. We look forward to on-going exchanges with partners and allies in business, finance, governments, EU institutions, labor organizations and NGOs about how to achieve simplification in practice without undermining the original intent of the legislation.

Putting human rights at the heart of a just transition

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson

By Federico Burlon, Deputy Director for Business Engagement, and Brianna Peterson, Senior Advisor.

It is more important than ever for businesses to pay close attention to the links between climate change and human rights.

Global emissions continue to rise and the impacts are already being felt globally. Without urgent action to limit warming, major tipping points could be passed, leading to irreversible consequences for nature and societies, hitting those most at risk the hardest. A warmer world will also create tremendous financial and operational risks for business. Action to limit warming to the globally agreed limit of 1.5°C, therefore, is not an aspirational target – it is a scientific, societal, and business imperative.

Over the last two weeks, the world’s attention has rightly been on the global climate negotiations taking place in Baku. While more ambitious government action is essential, it alone will not be sufficient to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change. Bold and decisive action from businesses around the world is equally necessary to drive the change needed.

How businesses approach this action—and who stands to be most impacted by their decisions—is a critical question for every company to consider. For Shift, the answer is clear: we will only have succeeded if the transition to a low carbon future happens in a way that reduces inequality and respects and upholds people’s human rights. That is the only way to ensure a sustainable future that protects both people and the planet.

Action to build a fair and inclusive society where everyone has enough to provide for themselves and their families, engage in their communities, and exercise their rights is a necessary precondition for the transition to a low carbon, equitable, and climate-resilient future. A climate transition that disregards people’s dignity or exacerbates existing inequalities will face significant implementation challenges and risks being unsustainable in the long term. In other words, for the transition to be both effective and lasting, it must be equitable.

To play the role they should in tackling inequality, companies must embed respect for human rights across their operations. It’s through effective human rights due diligence processes and systems to enable remedy for harms that companies can reduce inequality. And, in so doing, they will strengthen the impact of their climate action, both now and into the future.

The link between human rights and climate action was made clear recently by the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). The Directive introduces an obligation for companies to “adopt and put into effect” a climate transition plan that is aligned with the Paris Agreement goal to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C. And because of the core due diligence duty in the Directive, it follows that these plans should include human rights impacts connected to a company’s climate mitigation and adaptation activities.

Over the past couple of years, Shift has worked with companies and financial institutions to integrate a human rights perspective into transition planning and climate action. In doing so, we are guided by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The UNGPs not only established the responsibility of all companies to respect human rights as an international standard and set the foundation for the new EU due diligence law, but they also offer a vital framework for businesses to pursue people-centered climate action—ensuring that their efforts are not only effective but also fair, inclusive, and equitable.

Our work has demonstrated that embedding the core principles of human rights due diligence into climate action enables businesses to effectively identify, prevent, mitigate, and remediate harms to both people and planet. And while there are many ways in which applying a human rights lens can help, there are three that stand out as clear reasons why Shift will continue to push for human rights to be a core consideration in climate transition plans.

First, the UNGPs help companies to identify and prioritize human rights impacts related to their climate action. The UNGPs expect companies to adopt a principled approach to prioritization, based on severity of impact – as opposed to an approach based, for example, on what it is easiest to address, or on what the company perceives as the most important impact from the perspective of the business. 

Second, a UNGP approach expects companies to meaningfully engage with stakeholders, especially the people and communities most affected by their climate action. The UNGPs recognize that stakeholder engagement is not only a moral imperative, but also a practical tool for better decision-making and more effective risk management. It will help companies anticipate potential risk, build stronger community relations, and ultimately take lasting climate action. Engaging the right stakeholders at the right time is crucial to minimizing operational, reputational, legal, and financial risks, while ensuring that actions taken are both sustainable and impactful.

Third, applying a UNGP lens to climate action will create an opportunity to break down silos between different departments within a company, including bringing together the teams that lead on climate action with human rights practitioners, legal, compliance and procurement, among others. This cross-company approach can often lead to better business outcomes that recognize and account for the different interrelated aspects of successfully implementing decarbonization and adaptation actions.

As another year of climate negotiations comes to an end, there is still a huge amount of work that needs to be done. Our likely future still lies well beyond thresholds considered “safe”. The international scientific consensus says that to have any chance of keeping global average temperatures increase below 1.5 degrees then global emissions of carbon dioxide need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050. This will require companies to make bold decisions—big and small—every single day. To be successful, these decisions must integrate respect for human rights. The UNGPs provide a blueprint for getting these decisions right, ensuring they respect the rights of all people.

Shift welcomes substantial alignment of the political agreement on the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive with the UNGPs

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson

14 December 2023

Shift – the leading non-profit centre of expertise on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) – welcomes the provisional political agreement reached this week between the European Commission, Council and Parliament on the final outline of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D). It lays the groundwork for a new corporate sustainability due diligence duty that is substantially aligned with the authoritative standard of the UNGPs. This is an essential step towards the implementation of comprehensive human rights and environmental due diligence in the EU single market. It is also a pivotal moment in the creation of the “new regulatory dynamic” that John Ruggie, the author of the UNGPs, intended the UNGPs to inspire.[1]

This agreement reflects hard work by the negotiators over many months, and inputs from a wide array of stakeholders from business, civil society, trade unions and international organizations. We congratulate the consecutive Presidencies of the Council, MEP Lara Wolters and the Parliament’s Shadow Rapporteurs, and Commissioner Reynders on the positive result.

In welcoming the political agreement, Shift’s Co-Founder and Vice President, Rachel Davis, said:

“Just over a decade on from the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the EU is leading the way in using them to create a binding standard – the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. The momentous political agreement reached this week lays the groundwork for a new corporate sustainability due diligence duty that is substantially aligned with the UNGPs.

To ensure that the CS3D is meaningful for workers, communities and others affected by business, as well as manageable for companies, it will be vital that guidance, accompanying policy measures and enforcement continue to interpret key concepts in the duty in line with the international due diligence standards. Importantly, there is also room to improve the alignment between the Directive and those standards in the coming years in relation to due diligence in the sale of products and services and in the financial sector. For now, this agreement confirms that companies that have been following the international standards are on the right track and can continue to rely on them.”

Throughout the debate, Shift and many other stakeholders have consistently highlighted key features of a final Directive that are central to alignment with the international due diligence standards – the UNGPs and OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. The positions of the institutional negotiators have increasingly built on those standards as the process has moved forwards. This political agreement now ensures that the new due diligence duty will be grounded in a risk-based approach that:

  • covers the different ways in which companies may be involved with adverse human rights and environmental impacts and differentiates the action that is expected of them in response, including to provide or enable remedy;
  • allows companies to prioritize impacts that are the most severe from the perspective of those who are affected, and the most likely;
  • expects companies to address how their business strategies and own activities, including purchasing practices, can enhance or reduce risks.

The duty includes other key elements that companies can and will need to interpret in line with the international standards to ensure they are effective in practice, namely:

  • when taking appropriate measures to prevent and address impacts involving their business relationships, ensuring that the use of contractual leverage is accompanied by broader capacity-building measures to support due diligence through a partnership rather than ‘policing’ approach;
  • when considering disengagement from a business relationship, investing in time-bound plans to increase leverage – while also recognizing when there are no reasonable prospects that their use of leverage can be effective;
  • when engaging with stakeholdersin the context of human rights impacts, ensuring that they focus on those who are affected (ie, workers, communities and others affected by the company’s operations, products or services) and their legitimate representatives (such as trade unions);
  • when implementing notification mechanisms and complaints procedures, ensuring that they are likely to be trusted by users by following the effectiveness criteria for grievance mechanisms in the UNGPs. 

The duty will be enforced through both civil liability – which will require a causal connection between the company’s actions or omissions and a harm – and administrative supervision. The agreement provides that the Directive will include access to justice measures in relation to representative actions, limitation periods and disclosure of evidence. It also provides that companies will be required to put in place climate change transition plans that align with the Paris Agreement.

EU Member States and the Commission are expected to adopt accompanying policy measures and issue authoritative guidance. These should draw on the past decade of interpretation and practical implementation of the international standards to ensure that the CS3D delivers on its promise of better outcomes for affected stakeholders and the environment.

However, there are some critical gaps between the Directive and the UNGPs where there is a need to improve alignment in the coming years. In these areas, it will be important that companies continue to look to the international standards to inform their approach. In particular:

  • while the duty covers all impacts arising in a company’s ‘upstream’ business relationships (including design), it covers some but not all ‘downstream’ impacts. It does cover those arising from distribution, transport and waste management, but impacts arising from sale are not explicitly covered;
  • while the duty applies to companies across all sectors of the real economy, it will not apply to any downstream business relationships in the financial sector. However, a review clause requires this to be revisited in due course and financial institutions will be expected to adopt climate plans;
  • while the duty will apply to the largest companies headquartered or operating in the EU, and additional companies in some higher-risk sectors, this is only a sub-set of the companies that are already required by new EU reporting standards to disclose how they are managing their sustainability impacts.

It will be essential for the EU to revisit these aspects of the scope of the legislation in the coming years; at the same time, they do not negate the significance of the political agreement on the core of the new due diligence duty. 

Shift looks forward to remaining constructively engaged to support the formal adoption of the final CS3D text, its transposition into national laws, and the development of guidance, accompanying policy measures and enforcement regimes.

[1] Keynote address at the conference by the Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU in Brussels in 2019

Call for the ISSB to prioritize development of a thematic social-related disclosures standard

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson
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The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) has issued a proposed set of future Agenda Priorities for public consultation. These include both ‘human capital’ and ‘human rights’ with regard to social issues. Shift, the B Team and the World Benchmarking Alliance share a concern that this approach will foster further confusion and complexity in the market given the extent to which these two categories are overlapping and intertwined. 

In this set of ‘key messages’ we jointly highlight the important opportunity ISSB now has to set the right foundations for disclosures on social matters by starting with a general thematic standard, much as it did for climate. This would enable a clear architecture for social issues and deliver the contextual information that investors need regarding those aspects of corporate governance, strategy, risk management and metrics that are particular to social matters. Our three organizations are disseminating these messages in the hope that they resonate with others who may be responding to the ISSB consultation. We invite everyone to draw from them as they see fit.

Announcement of the John Ruggie Fellowship Program 2023 Host Organizations and Application Process

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson

New York, NY, May 25, 2023 – John Ruggie was a preeminent scholar-practitioner in the field of international affairs. He was, among other roles, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on business and human rights, the author of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the founding chair of Shift, the nonprofit, mission-driven organization dedicated to implementing the UNGPs. In 2022, together with John Ruggie’s family, Shift announced the establishment of the John Ruggie Fellowship Program to honor John’s life and legacy and enable talented business and human rights students to advance their careers and contribution to the field. It particularly seeks to support students who may otherwise lack access to such opportunities.

Each year, Shift will partner with a small number of leading organizations to support the placement of individual Fellows. Shift is pleased to announce that the host organizations for the first year of the John Ruggie Fellowship Program are:

  • Accountability Counsel, a nonprofit organization that amplifies the voices of communities around the world to protect their human rights and environment. As advocates for people harmed by internationally financed projects, they employ community-driven and policy-level strategies to enable access to justice.
  • PepsiCo, a leading food and beverage company that recognizes they have a clear responsibility to respect human rights throughout their business and broader value chain. To help ensure that they are in the best position to prevent, identify, and address potential impacts across their value chain, they have established a global human rights management approach that is guided by the UNGPs.
  • Verité, a nonprofit organization that illuminates and addresses serious human rights and labor rights violations in factories, farms, and other workplaces around the world. They work with private and public sector clients by building their understanding of labor rights problems in global supply chains and developing their abilities to solve those problems.

The organizations are reflective of the diversity of actors in the business and human rights field, and share a demonstrated commitment to the implementation of the UNGPs. They all have considerable experience running fellowship and internship programs and are committed to delivering a high-value immersive experience for the Fellows.

We are confident that each of these host organizations will provide a rich learning experience for individual Fellows looking to gain practical experience and access to ideas and networks that will support their growth in the field of business and human rights. We look forward to working with them to ensure a successful inaugural year of the John Ruggie Fellowship Program.

Caroline Rees & Rachel Davis, Shift co-founders

Application Process:

Each host organization will provide detail on their John Ruggie Fellowship Program opportunity and application process. Interested individuals should follow the host organization’s guidance. When available, that information can be found at:

Shift will add links to fellowship postings on this page, as available.

About the John Ruggie Fellowship Program:

Professor John Ruggie was a preeminent scholar-practitioner in the field of international affairs. As a political scientist, his work focused on the impact of globalization on international rule-making. Professor Ruggie applied his theoretical work to complex global governance challenges directly through his work at the United Nations (UN). This included his appointment in 2005 as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative (SRSG) on business and human rights. During his six-year mandate, he authored the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), which were unanimously endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, establishing them as the authoritative global standard on business and human rights. In the years since, the UNGPs have provided the basis for the field’s convergence around a shared set of expectations with regard to companies’ impacts on people and have been increasingly integrated into other international standards, industry commitments and guidance, and national and regional policy frameworks and legislation.

Throughout his career, John was a tireless champion of both students and practitioners in the fields in which he worked. He consistently sought out, consulted and supported individuals from all backgrounds and perspectives, to grow and enrich the community of people working to turn the vision of the UNGPs into a reality. The John Ruggie Fellowship Program was created by Shift – the non-profit, mission-driven organization dedicated to implementing the UNGPs of which John was the founding chair – in collaboration with John’s family to honor his life and legacy.

For more information on the John Ruggie Legacy Fund and John Ruggie Fellowship Program, please visit the webpage.

Operationalizing Remedy for Financial Institutions with the Equator Principles Association 

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson

On 25 October the Equator Principles Association (EPA) released a suite of new due diligence tools designed to enhance access to grievance mechanisms and enable effective remedy in project finance transactions. Shift was pleased to partner with the EPA’s Working Group on the development of the tools, which will be valuable for Equator Principles Financial Institutions (EPFIs), their clients and consultants. The tools provide guidance for users to enhance remedy at various stages of a transaction and due diligence process.

The Equator Principles:
The Equator Principles set the financial industry benchmark for identifying, assessing and managing environmental and social risks in projects. The Principles are adopted by 137 financial institutions in 38 countries, and apply globally, to all industry sectors and to various project-related financial products.

The tools mark a notable step in the evolution of the standards and guidance of the EPA. They reinforce the importance of improving outcomes for people affected by projects financed by financial institutions in line with international standards (UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and OECD Guidelines). They do so by focusing specifically on human rights impacts in projects and on seeking to ensure that people affected have access to remedy.

These tools should help financial institutions address a persistent “remedy gap”: namely, that in too many cases, remedy is not available for people who are harmed by business activities that are part of projects they finance. The guidance draws from existing practice amongst leading financial institutions that already understand and demonstrate the important role they and their peers can play by using their leverage to enable remedy. This can have a critical role in strengthening the remedy ecosystem, resulting in better outcomes for vulnerable workers or communities affected by projects.

Two of the five tools (RM1 And RM2) specifically address the need to “front-load” for effective remedy.  Practice has shown that financial institutions can assess a client’s preparedness for remedy upfront in the due diligence process, and then use leverage to enhance higher risk clients’ capacity and commitment to provide remedy should it become necessary. The tools provide concrete guidance to execute this approach.

Importantly, the EPA also sets these tools in context. They provide guidance that will most typically apply in the common scenario where financial institutions are linked to a harm, but have not contributed to it by enabling or incentivizing the actions that led to it. They also recognize, however, that there may be situations where financial institutions contribute to harm and that they will then have a direct role to play in providing remedy. This distinction is important in light of the persistent myth that financial institutions will never cause or contribute to impacts in their portfolio, whether through their actions or omissions. This notion has been rebutted by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the OECD, which have a mandate to interpret the UN Guiding Principles and the OECD Guidelines respectively, looking at both commercial banking as well as development finance contexts.

Practically speaking, contributing to remedy or supporting a client’s efforts to provide remedy will likely follow very overlapping paths – both will often require using and/or enhancing leverage with clients and working directly with them to execute remedy on the ground.  The new EPA tools provide many useful practical tips to support financial institutions in meeting those objectives.

Understanding Linkage and Responsibility for Remedy
“See the EPA Human Rights Guidance Note for a discussion of the ways in which EPFIs and other actors might be connected to adverse impacts, including the UNGPs framework of cause, contribution and linkage. As that note and additional authoritative guidance from OHCHR and the OECD highlight, financial institutions can, in some instances, contribute to project-related impacts. In such cases, EPFIs will have a responsibility not only to use leverage to encourage remedy, but to contribute directly to remedy in a manner proportionate to their contribution. EPFIs should carefully analyze their involvement with impacts in specific cases to understand their responsibility related to remedy.”
Source: EPA Remedy Tools

There are five related due diligence tools in the EPA suite of tools covering grievance mechanisms and remedy:

  • GM1: Grievance Mechanism Design: Diagnostic Questions
  • GM2: Monitoring Effective Grievance Mechanism Performance: Sample Reporting Metrics
  • RM1: Assessing Preparedness for Remedy: Diagnostic Questions
  • RM2: Strengthening Preparedness for Remedy: Sample Leverage Actions
  • RM3: Using Leverage for Remedy after Impacts Occur: Sample Leverage Actions

The tools are all available on the EPA’s website. Although written in the context of project finance, they will offer inspiration for commercial banks and development finance institutions who are working to take an ‘ecosystem’ approach to remedy.

For more on financial institutions and remedy, see Shift’s Financial Institutions Practitioners Circle publication, “FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND REMEDY: MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS”.

For more information please contact Ashleigh Owens, Financial Institutions Lead at ashleigh[dot]owens[at]shiftproject[dot]org.  

Comments by Shift on the Draft Report on Minimum Safeguards

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson
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Shift welcomes the publication of the Draft Report on Minimum Safeguards by the Platform on Sustainable Finance, and its call for feedback on the content and recommendations. The report bypasses simplistic approaches and grapples with the challenge at the center of this endeavor, which is how to assess the adequacy of a human rights due diligence process – and how to do so at scale.

There is no single or simple way to meet this challenge, not least because current data in the public arena on companies’ social performance is not up to the task. At the same time, the report rightly notes that developments relating to EU reporting requirements are set to change that reality, and should increase the availability of high-value information. Of course, in many cases, this will still require that analysts and assurance providers have the skills to contextualize and assess that information.

We believe the report’s recommendations point in the right direction, but may require further elaboration in some instances. We also recognize that a first version of the safeguards will be – and should be explicitly acknowledged as – a starting point grounded in today’s best ‘art of the possible’, that will need to further evolve in the years to come, as available data and experience with social indicators improve.

This document contains our comments on the Draft Report on Minimum Safeguards, which were submitted to the Platform on Sustainable Finance.  

IOC Announces Commitment to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

Posted on by Matilda Donaldson

Today the International Olympic Committee (IOC) published its new Strategic Framework on Human Rights. This is informed by the strategic recommendations made by Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein and Rachel Davis in their 2020 report for the IOC on aligning the organization’s approach with the UNGPs. 

Welcoming the IOC’s announcement, Prince Zeid and Rachel Davis said:

“Shift welcomes the IOC’s public commitment to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, announced today in its new Strategic Framework on Human Rights. This is a significant development for the IOC and it sets an important precedent for sports bodies across the Olympic Movement to drive meaningful change in preventing and addressing risks to people. 

As the organization moves forward, new approaches will be needed to effectively tackle some of the most severe impacts facing athletes today, including harassment and abuse, voice and representation, and the need for greater access to remedy – informed by the perspectives of those directly affected. This Framework is a crucial first step. We look forward, together with other stakeholders, to supporting the IOC as it works to meet its responsibility to respect human rights in practice.”