PARTNERSHIPS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

(Project Proposal)

Course: Business Sustainability and Carbon Markets Submitted to: Prof. Sushil Kumar Date: 1st July 2011

Group 3|Sec B
Bharadwaz Yagalla Govind Warrier Gaurav Bhuwania Kalyan V B H Solomon Dheeraj

Introduction
It is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to execute their sustainability strategies alone. The complexity of the problem and the means of solving it have mandated the need for partnerships with various stakeholders. Companies have slowly started realizing that network organizing is inevitable as a means of achieving great goals. One of the famous cases on this note is the McDonalds-Green peace collaborative efforts to tackle the issue of Amazon deforestation due to soy beans cultivation. Specifically the project would deal the following aspects of sustainable development partnerships. 1. Partnering with NGOs With the increasing awareness of the people, they start demanding more from the companies regarding the sustainability and green issues. As this is not the core competence of the companies, more and more companies are looking towards NGOs like Greenpeace for solutions. This would not only help in achieving efficient solutions but also help in increasing the brand equity of the company as they are contributing for the society. One good example could be the current campaign by Greenpeace against Airtel to stop using diesel. Airtel could work this in favor of the company by admitting the fact and partnering with Greenpeace for efficient renewable energy solution. This has been proved beneficial to the companies in the case of McDonalds, which partnered with Greenpeace to stop the soy seeds produced in the rain forests of South America. 2. Supplier partnership and backward integration Off late many MNCs have shifted focus towards sustainable business models. The top management is now sensitive to the environment and human rights issues vis. a vis. the cost benefits. The companies are analyzing their value creation chain to identify the investment opportunities they have for sustainable growth. For instance beverage companies like PepsiCo and Coke which were once notorious for exploiting the ground water resources some years ago have invested in R&D to come up with models to regenerate the ground water levels and improve the farming practices to increase productivity, hence empowering the business and farmers. In this project we propose to identify few key sectors of the industries where in we can identify measure for Human Sustainability, Environmental Sustainability and Talent sustainability. We would analyze the reporting methods of the sustainability reports to suggest some changes which might benefit the company and environment. 3. Livelihoods Companies have started to collaborate with the population staying around their establishment to annul the livelihood impact of the company operations. This is particularly true for some industries like Mining, Steel , Energy etc. Most of the times establishing the

premises for such industries would involve relocation of residents in the land and compensating them etc. More often than not this leads to lot of protests by the civil society, the locals. A company cannot claim to be sustainable if it runs business by displacing local population and destroying their livelihoods. Keeping this mind, of late a lot companies have started to collaborate with the locals as a part of their sustainability focus and also due to regulatory mandates. A recent example in this is of NTPCs partnership with tribal families in Kerala for their Wind generation plant. As a part of this initiative NTPC in collaboration with the Kerala state electricity board would provide a fixed and long term compensation for the tribal families who would lose their land due to the wind power generation plant. 4. Knowledge collaboration Another recent trend in terms of sustainability partnerships are the collaboration efforts of various companies in terms of knowledge and intellectual property/patent sharing of their sustainability initiatives. A well known example of this is the Green Xchange started by companies like Nike in collaboration with BestBuy and Salesforce.com. The green xchange specifically deals with knowledge sharing of various efforts done by the companies to be greener and more sustainable in their operations. More and more companies like Yahoo and organizations like Creative Commons have started collaborating on these lines. 5. Government initiatives, Public private partnerships It is very difficult to attain lofty goals of sustainability without active collaboration of various policy making bodies and governments. Of late governments have also initiated a lot of programs and have become facilitators for large scale collaborations on sustainability initiatives. A popular initiative in this regard is the U.S Governments Sustainable Development Partnerships (SDP) initiative. Some of the initiatives by SDP have 100s of partners spanning across 50+ countries in Private sector, public sector, NGOs etc.

Project Objectives
Elaborate on the nature of various partnerships that organizations are getting involved with various social organizations Emphasize on how various stakeholders like Governments, People, NGOs etc. synergize together in achieving the common goal.

Sources of Data
The major sources of data for the project would be Journals and books for types and trends in sustainable partnerships News articles for the latest corporate partnerships Information from various social organizations like green peace about the activities of partnerships.