Business Improvements through Implementation of International Investors’ Standards

摘要

Environmental and social standards of the international investors (e.g. World Bank Group, The European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, the Asian Development Bank, Export Credit Agencies and others) have been actively evolving over the last 20 years. These standards have been initially developed as a risk management tool for international lenders. With time they have become a representation of good practices in environmental, health, safety and social management. Standards are widely used both within financing and non-financing context. However it is difficult to find practical examples in the existing body of literature which describe whether and how application of these standards is actually beneficial for companies and their projects. The objective of the paper is to analyse the experience of several companies in applying international environmental and social standards and identify how they benefited from their use. This paper also discusses reasons for use of the standards, key challenges encountered by the companies and solutions they implemented. International investors’ standards are different from most domestic regulatory requirements. Firstly, they aim to meet long-term sustainability objectives rather than deliver short-term compliance-based outcomes. In practice this means ongoing improvement rather than pure compliance with certain regulations. Secondly, they cover a broad scope of sustainability issues, e.g. human rights, safety culture and social licence to operate and many others. Often this requires very efficient collaboration between internal and external stakeholders. Thirdly, they rely on risk-based approach often taking owners out of their comfort zone by calling for a change in a decisionmaking process. The paper demonstrates how companies managed to overcome the challenges and benefited both within a financing and non-financing context: from contributing to longer-term sustainability of businesses, to unlocking an access to different investment options.