Lessons for large companies expanding their sustainability programmes into high-growth markets

Lesson one:  Corporate responsibility and sustainability issues are vastly different around the world.

This is true even in Europe. Ethical Corporation’s country briefing series shows just how different thinking, policy and expectations can be across Europe alone. There remain huge differences in priorities, for example, between richer, northern Europe and eastern and southern Europe, where many basic institutions remain under-resourced.

Outside the EU, India is as different from China as it is from the UK. Everything is local and culture counts, more than almost anything else.

Lesson two: Global principles with local implementation are the only way large companies can operate successfully and sustainably.

Flexibility for business is essential. The fine balance is between global principles and maintaining consistency with both corporate values and local expectations.

Lesson three: The world is more left-wing than the UK and US.

This is often hard to understand for UK companies, and particularly those from the US. Most democracies are much more like those of western Europe than they are the US. This means a very different set of expectations for the role of business in society. Most notable is the paradigm that the role of business is to serve social structures, not the other way around.

Lesson four: Governments are unpredictable on sustainability issues.

This is becoming clear to western companies. This does not just apply to sustainability issues. China, for example, rules by dictat, and companies had better get in line with the latest pay rise, transparency or five-year plan expectations, and fast.

Lesson five: Institutions as we know them often do not exist.

The importance of institutions is perhaps the most undervalued area within the field of global responsibility thinking. We take our essential institutions for granted, from environmental protection to child education, and often forget they have taken hundreds of years and vast wealth to develop. Expectations, particularly around behaviour, are partly governed by them. Yet by comparison they barely exist elsewhere. This has consequences, both for how companies are expected to behave, and how they might respond to play a role in filling this gap.