Business and Human Rights Scholarship: Developing networks and perspectives from the Global South

The United Kingdom's National Action Plan (NAP) on Business and Human Rights (BHRs) promotes the development of partnerships with allied countries seeking to implement the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) (UK National Action Plan 2020). The NAP also encourages UK companies to establish judicial and non-judicial operational level grievance mechanisms in their overseas operation, to enhance corporate-community nexus. This potentially encourages and empowers companies to align their activities and approaches with internationally recognised principles on human rights, environment, labour, and climate change. However, business enterprises and transnational corporate actors operate in a complex global environment, especially in high-risk sectors such as mining, oil and gas, telecommunications, construction, banking, and health care amongst others. Understanding human rights responsibilities, impacts and socially responsible behaviour for companies is therefore an essential component of corporate risk management in our current world. Over the last several decades, the African continent has been the epicentre of complex human rights, environmental and social impacts resulting from industrial activities, manufacturing processes, and resource production operations, particularly in extractive and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industries. Consequently, responding to current and anticipated human rights impacts of business activities and transnational investments on local communities is squarely at the forefront of the political and legislative agenda across Africa. However, despite the rise in policy formulation on BHRs in the UK and Global North generally, legal preparedness to effectively implement the UNGPs remains uneven in Africa - in terms of policy discourses, networking, education, and training. This has raised a clear and urgent need for home-grown, in-depth, and exhaustive assessment that analyses the local contexts for the implementation of the UNGPs across Africa, the key challenges that remain, and the way forward in terms of designing good-fit approaches to effectively address the drivers of adverse human rights impacts across the entire value chain of respective economic sectors and activities in Africa. To achieve these integral aspects of a human rights regime, there is need to develop, nurture and support homegrown scholars who can steer the continuous development of UK's agenda on the implementation and application of BHRs norms in Africa. However, one of the key concerns in Africa is the lack of adequate legal and policy capacity on implementing and applying BHRs needed to achieve a green economy. Currently, no institution in Africa have dedicated courses that address policy components of a green economy, and BHRs law. Even more challenging is the absence of a regional platform for scholars and researchers in environmental law and policy fields to come together to explore common issues and to exchange ideas on training, capacity development and policy reinforcement in the region. Thus, there is the need to enhance capacity, interdisciplinary training, and scholarly exchange on core principles of a BHRs regime. Understanding and improving different forms of multi-actor and multi-level governance to address BHRs challenges in Africa is an urgent challenge and warrants a coordinated research approach. The proposed Workshops will become a high-level capacity development event to connect BHRs teachers, researchers, professionals, policy makers and academics in Africa, with UN experts and development practitioners in different sectors.