Stakeholder Engagement: Meaningful, Manageable or Misplaced?
Speakers
This webinar explores meaningful stakeholder engagement in business, examining challenges, best practices, and strategies for effective collaboration with local actors, particularly in fragile and high-risk environments.
Recent legislation has reinforced a requirement that businesses engage in MSE (meaningful stakeholder engagement) as part of human rights due diligence and corporate accountability strategies. Yet for many companies, across different sectors, translating sustainability and responsibility policies into concrete actions on the ground is a challenge. Identifying, understanding and working with local actors particularly in fragile environments requires resources and skills, and too often leads to frustration and increased distrust on both sides.
In this webinar we discuss what ‘meaningful’ engagement means, what good engagement strategies look like, and offer some suggestions for innovative practices that manage and meet the expectations of local communities impacted by business and investment operations. We focus in particular on fragile and volatile contexts where MSE may be more challenging. In these settings companies may be looking at heightened human rights due diligence. As highlighted in our previous webinar, hHRDD also requires sensitive and constructive collaboration with local actors.
Among the questions we will address are:
How do you decide who are relevant stakeholders?
What works in establishing successful dialogues with local actors?
How can you incorporate MSE alongside other elements of impact management and assessment?
Meet the Spakers
Dr Mary Martin, Senior Policy Fellow LSE Ideas and Director the Human Impact Pathway
Mark van Dorp, Founding Partner at Elevate, Research Associate at LSE IDEAS and Lead Field Researcher at the Human Impact Pathway
Suzanne Giele is a social impact leader with international experience at the intersection of business, sustainability and human rights in multinational FMCG environments. She currently leads the global agenda on social impact, human rights and responsible sourcing at LIPTON Teas & Infusions, advancing initiatives on living wages, safe working conditions and supplier engagement. Previously, she worked for HEINEKEN, where she served amongst others as general manager of the HEINEKEN Africa Foundation, driving strategic partnerships and community development across Africa.
Ruth Venza is a Strategic Management Consultant and Lecturer at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. With a PhD in Strategic Management, her work focuses on human rights due diligence, ethical sourcing, sustainability, and inclusive governance. She combines academic expertise with practical consultancy experience, supporting organizations and communities to align their operations with global standards for justice, accountability, and inclusive development.
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