The 1992 Summit at Rio presented business with a challenge and an opportunity; a challenge to align its practices with the aspiration encapsulated in Sustainable Development; an opportunity to take the lead in finding the answers.

Over the past 20 years, Non Government Organisations (NGO) in India have moved from welfare to development. They have now taken the next big step to community investment with business partners. This means actively working with private businesses and local government to carry out activities that benefit both. It means addressing environmental problems with a scientific background, promoting waste management, training people on clean technology, and reducing pollution at the local and global context. Over the past few years, through its research, design, development, consultancy, training and implementation activities, Development Alternatives has demonstrated ways in which issues of environment and development can be addressed effectively with a collective effort involving international institutions, business groups, non-governmental institutions, local communities, local governments, State and Central authorities to provide answers to their environmental problems. Several of the strategies, processes and products developed and field tested have been recognised and adopted quite extensively in India and overseas. Development Alternatives has now got involved in the Global Reporting Initiative.

What is the Global Reporting Initiative?
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is a long-term, multi-stakeholder, international undertaking whose mission is to develop and disseminate globally applicable sustainability reporting guidelines for voluntary use by organisations reporting on the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of their activities, products and services.

Since its inception in 1997, the GRI has worked to design and build acceptance of a common framework for reporting on the linked aspects of sustainability-the economic, the environmental, and the social. Although in the long term the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines are intended to be applicable to all types of organisations, the GRI’s initial development work has focused on reporting by business organisations.

GRI – Need of the hour?
Private enterprise and global markets have merged as powerful economic forces in the 21st century. To their proponents, these forces offer unprecedented opportunities for profitable investment, market expansion, and increased wealth and job opportunities for people around the world. To their critics, such trends are eroding the ability of civil society and governments to ensure that private sector activities serve the public interest while continuing to create wealth. The danger, it is argued, is that the failure of current governance structures to keep pace with changes in the global economy will lead to accelerating problem for humanity and for the biosphere. Disagreements over these matters have intensified in the press, in the halls of government, in the business community, and in a variety of international forums. Business, government, individual citizens, and civil society all share responsibility for managing impacts on humanity and the biosphere. However, it is the business impacts that, thus far, have attracted the maximum attention in governance and policy debates.

Spurred by such tensions along with the rapid growth of global capital markets and information technology, parties from business, government, and civil society are searching for new approaches to synchronise governance with the economic and social realities of the 21st century. Business managers, investors, consumers, governments, and others are all asking versions of the same question: How do we obtain a clear picture of the human and ecological impact of business, so that we can make informed decisions about our investments, purchases, and partnerships? Achieving such clarity in measurement and reporting holds the promise of delivering value, both to business- by providing a critical management tool-and to external stakeholders-by providing timely, relevant, and reliable information on the reporting organisation.

Paradoxically, this shared interest in new approaches to measuring and reporting business impacts has produced a proliferation of inconsistent reporting approaches developed by business, government, and civil society. As diverse groups seek information, business encounters escalating demands in queries that are inconsistent, giving rise to even more confusion and frustration. The GRI is an attempt to resolve this paradox.

By drawing hundreds of partners into a voluntary, multi-stakeholder, consensus-based process, the GRI seeks to reduce confusion, harmonise rules of disclosure as much as possible, and maximise the value of reporting for reporting organisations and report users alike. Whatever their affiliation, participants in the GRI share the view that performance information must be elevated to unprecedented levels of completeness, comparability, and credibility. Many, who have studied the evolution of financial accounting and reporting standards over the course of the 20th century, believe that the GRI will follow a similar, though accelerated, pattern in the 21st century. Whether one is an institutional investor using environmental information to assess risk, an activist trying to enter into dialogue with management, a government official choosing among possible corporate partners, or a senior executive seeking to lead an organisation to higher levels of efficiency and innovation, every party needs clear, orderly information to evaluate economic, environmental, and social performance.

The Guidelines of Reporting
Through this June 2000 release of the Guidelines, the GRI aims to help organisations report information:

q in a way that presents a clear picture of the human and ecological impact of business, to facilitate informed decisions about investments, purchases, and partnerships;

q in a way that provides stakeholders with reliable information that is relevant to their needs and interests and that invites further stakeholder dialogue and enquiry;

q in a way that provides a management tool to help the reporting organisation evaluate and continuously improve its performance and progress;

q in accordance with well-established, widely accepted external reporting principles, applied consistently from one reporting period to the next, to promote transparency and credibility;

q in a format that is easy to understand and that facilitates comparison with reports by other organisations;

q in a way that complements, not replaces, other reporting standards, including financial; and

q in a way that illuminates the relationship among the three linked elements of sustainability-economic (including but not limited to financial information), environmental, and social.

The Future
This confluence of historical opportunity and shared interest has powered the rapid development of the GRI. There are, of course, many challenges ahead. Although the GRI has brought together many supporters of sustainability, the term does not yet enjoy a universally accepted meaning. The GRI recognises that the goal of reporting on the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of organisation-level activity-let alone a fully integrated sustainability assessment-is at the earliest stages of a journey that will continue for many years.

The GRI believes that the long-term objective of developing "generally accepted sustainability accounting principles" requires both a concrete product incorporating the best thinking to date and a stable process through which continuous learning can occur. The GRI will provide both by releasing steadily improving Sustainability Reporting Guidelines based on research and public comment on a regular cycle. In this manner, the GRI is striving to build acceptance of the Guidelines and to establish the credibility and trust among stakeholders and reporters that is critical to achieving its mission.

The GRI will strive to improve the Guidelines over time. It will continue to broaden its base of stakeholders, to engage those interested in pursuing the GRI mission, and to advance the usefulness of the Guidelines to all stakeholders. It will encourage reporters and users alike to review and apply the Guidelines and to bring feedback and experiences to the GRI’s attention. The Guidelines will be updated taking this feedback into account, probably in 2002. Unless otherwise indicated, the GRI will assume that all such feedback is a matter of public record.

The Role of Development Alternatives
Development Alternatives has been involved with the GRI Secretariat to co-organise the first South Asian GRI Briefing Meet on 25 and 27 September at New Delhi and Mumbai, respectively. The two day meeting brought in people from different arenas corporate and business, NGOs, labour unions, government agencies , etc to come to a common platform of the understanding of this reporting system, its benefits and user friendliness. The meeting brought out from both the report makers and the report users some key issues like the application and repercussions of corporate reporting in the South Asian context. The GRI Secretariat will now work on these issues and will reframe the guideline to suit the South Asian countries. The 2nd International Symposium at Washington DC on Nov 13-15, 2000 will bring about 450 participants from all over the world to formalise on the coordination of GRI and its guidelines in different parts of the world.

GRI can have multi role involvement in any negotiations of Climate Change mitigation projects, carbon credits, clean technology transfer and so on. The reports can become an endorsement to negotiations, protocols and conventions provided they are prepared and used in the right spirit. Therefore, as an NGO and a research institution, Development Alternatives will try to become the ‘watchdog’ in the preparation and use of the GRI reports.q