Bringing a Human Rights Lens to Stakeholder Engagement

Principles on Business and Human Rights. Meaningful stakeholder engagement is particularly essential in a business’ efforts to meet its corporate responsibility to respect human rights. An increasing number of companies have sophisticated systems and processes for conducting a wide range of stakeholder engagement activities, and there is a substantial body of guidance around effective stakeholder engagement. However, in practice, many human rights impacts can be linked back to challenges related to stakeholder engagement. It appears that more effective stakeholder engagement often could have prevented or mitigated them. According to one expert in human rights and stakeholder engagement, “Effective stakeholder engagement is one of the most powerful and under-utilized tools we have in addressing human rights risks.”