Most companies are still not being open enough when disclosing their
social and environmental impacts, a senior CSR figure has said.
Tom Delfgaauw, a former Shell executive who with others spearheaded the
oil company’s promotion of responsible business practice, told a
Chatham House conference in London that a ‘very large number’ of
sustainability reports are ‘full of good news stories only, and fail
even the most modest tests of critical self-assessment’.
He told delegates that the rose-tinted approach of many reports showed
that ‘the state of denial so typical of the overall corporate debate
only a few years ago is still visible in abundance’.
Delfgaauw, who is chair of the council of the AccountAbility think-tank
and a member of the policy committee of the FTSE4Good index series,
said one reason for this might be ‘the paradox of transparency’ –
whereby the more information given to stakeholders, the greater the
ammunition ‘for new and fiercer attacks’ by pressure groups. He
regretted that, while companies that are committed to explicit
disclosure put themselves in the spotlight, ‘a competitor who
desperately tries not to volunteer any information whatsoever manages,
at least initially, to escape the storms’.
Delfgaauw said another reason for the general lack of insightful
corporate reporting was that much stakeholder engagement is ‘in
practice little more than a one-way information process in a strictly
controlled environment with a few – often friendly – outsiders’. Such
meetings rarely have the ‘tension’ necessary to reveal real concerns
that companies can reflect in their reports, he said.
