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From Policy to Personal - Translating a Business and Human Rights Agenda

Cowboy Hat

As a person who writes about (and cares about) business and human rights issues, I often tend to feel like I’m wearing the white hat. I try and give a voice to issues that affect folks around the world and try to make sure that I think through the impact of my words. However, Christine Bader has written a pair of articles that has really challenged me to assess how my ideas translate to my daily life.

Christine Bader

Christine, is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. She also worked on John Ruggie’s team for several years as they developed, first the Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework and then the Guiding Principles. To say that Christine has an intimate view of how business impacts human rights issues is an understatement.

But that’s only half of the story – Christine is also a new mom. To twins. A new mom who, by Christine’s own admission “took a fair amount of time and research” to make a decision about the best rug for her kids’ room – one that balanced issues that she cared about – being environmentally sound, locally produced and not made with child labor. I will now confess – I have never spent much time thinking about my purchases. When I can, I buy local. When I can’t, I run to my neighborhood Kroger’s. I have concerns about Facebook’s internet privacy policies but, not enough to close my account and lose touch with my friends. And I can tell you unequivocally that, until I read Christine’s articles, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could perform such extensive research on the things that I buy.

It’s painful to confess these things. It puts my values in a stark light against the backdrop of my reality. Oh, I can justify it a half dozen different ways – I don’t have time, I don’t have the energy, I do enough. But all that dwindles to nothing when I realize that a new mom of twins (who has a very productive career besides) is spending time that I never made to researching issues that I care about deeply.

So, thanks to Christine, I am determined to be more thoughtful on a professional and personal level about how these issues play out in the real world. I’m only sorry that it took me so long to do it.

My hat’s off to you Christine, my (slightly soiled) white hat.

For a full view of Christine’s articles on the subject see:
Watching the Waddle: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Baby Markey Huffington Post – October 25, 2012

Notes From the Bureau of Practicing What you Preach WSJ.com November 14, 2012

For a thoughtful take on China’s new “social risk reviews”and its potential impact in the U.S., see Christine’s article:
Why Americans Need to Rethink the Impact of Energy Production, Policy Mic, November 13, 2012

Photo Credits: photo of Christine taken from Kenan Institute, photo of cowboy hat taken from BJ’s & West

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