Our focus for this year’s challenge is reshaping practice, by holding all duty holders accountable in meeting the four key principles; Responsible, Purposeful, Inclusive, & Regenerative.
Our proposal is to introduce a sustainability or ethical rating system and 3rd party evaluation for organisations. Organisations would submit data and be interrogated on performance of their organization and their projects against the concepts in the UN SDG’s. This would be carried out in a similar way to the concepts used by LEED and BREAAM that are applied to buildings or projects. The score would be built up from performance across multiple goals, and could include a composite overall score. Periodic scoring would include both organisational processes and audits of a subset of their projects.
This evaluation system could be adapted and applied to investment institutions, owners, developers, consultants, engineers, contractors, and operations companies to measure responsibility/accountability through the value chain to make sure and there isn’t a ‘backdoor’ to sustainability.
Ultimately this evaluation system and scoring would contribute to investment decisions in capital projects in the finance/investment and banking industry, who would be interested in these scores as indicators of environmental and social risks to projects.
For infrastructure delivery organizations it would commercialize sustainability and responsibility as owners, developers, or investment firms will have incentive to select companies with a better score. This idea would drive companies to improve to stay relevant and competitive in the market. The scores and their breakdown could be public, with a breakdown of how the company scored against each criterion that makes up the score.
This is built on the idea of getting the financial institutions to drive improvement and ensuring supply chains attached to their investment are measured against a more comprehensive "responsibility".
Hi Rich, Thanks for your Concept Note. I'm Dan and I've been allocated as the mentor for this team. First of all, I love the focus on finance and accountability. This is a good lever to pull but a difficult one to pull effectively. When reading your note the concept of Environmental, Social and Governance (Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) Criteria Definition (investopedia.com)) metrics came to mind quite quickly. What I'm searching for is how your idea differs from existing practice. Have you looked in to how these are applied within the financial sector and how this translates in to the infrastructure sector? Also, am I correct to assume that your focus is on civil infrastructure and/or asset development? Fortunately, there is a lot of information on these types of rating and auditing systems. Lucky for you, my wife is actually a Senior Auditor for Triodos Investment Management (Welcome to Triodos Investment Management (triodos-im.com)) and has shared some useful guidelines from the finance sector:
- Microsoft Word - SRI Label Guidelines_EN_july2020updates_modifications.docx (lelabelisr.fr)
- Nordic Swan products Sets of criteria | Nordic Ecolabel (nordic-ecolabel.org)
- Nordic Swan funds Group | Nordic Ecolabel (nordic-ecolabel.org)
- Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB) - Exploring Materiality - SASB
- Global Reporting Initiative - GRI - Home (globalreporting.org) There is also plenty of information on social and environmental risk assessment within infrastructure development too and I can find you guidance on impact assessments: - Internationally the best practice is the IFC Performance Standards - Performance Standards (ifc.org) - Similarly the Equator Bank Principles are used in social and environmental risk analysis by investors of large infrastructure - Home Page - Equator Principles Association (equator-principles.com) Question is, how does your idea differ from these or does it solve a specific problem within this broad church of assessment methodology?
To try to define how your idea is going to create value within this space, you need to create a Value Proposition (Value Proposition Canvas – Download the Official Template (strategyzer.com)) that solves a clearly defined problem with a clearly defined solution.
First of all think about what problem you're trying to solve and who actually experiences that problem. You start by saying "holding all duty holders accountable" but how are you defining a duty holder? This would be your primary persona.
Once you know who you're designing for. Ask why is it important that they're held accountable and what problem are they facing in ensuring that they are implementing the four principles? It would be ideal if you could find (maybe via EWB-UK) somebody that fits the mould of your persona so you can validate your assumptions by interviewing them (maybe you don't have time though). Once you've defined who the main problem owner is, try to define what the consequence of not solving the problem is for that person and what their best alternative is. This will give you a good idea of why they'd engage with your proposed solution. Everybody needs an incentive and if you were really trying to implement this you'd need a succinct "elevator pitch" aimed at a clear target audience to gain traction and create change. Having understood the persona, the problem and their context, then you can think about what the solution would potentially look like or do. Is it a commercial service like a consultancy, is it a software product like one of the many ESG platform, is it an industry body like BREEAM or LEED, etc, etc.
There are a couple of good resources to guide you in exploration and validations: - IDEO Design Thinking - Design Thinking – IDEO U
- Strategyzer that takes the DT approach and applies useful templates for Value Propositions or Business Models - Strategyzer | Corporate Innovation Strategy, Tools & Training
I feel like that's enough bombarding you with information for now! First I'd suggest a bit more research on current approaches similar to your idea and then I'd suggest defining the value proposition of your idea a little more.
Give me a shout if you want to talk through any or all of this. I'm on the EWB-UK Slack channel or you can drop me an email at dpksmith@gmail.com