Tavares Group Blog

ISO 26000 Social Responsibility Standard Development Status

The future ISO 26000 social responsibility guidance standard has moved from working to committee draft status. This was one of the resolutions of the 6th plenary meeting of the Working Group (WG) on Social Responsibility (SR), which took place on 1-5 September 2008 in Santiago, Chile. The meeting was one of the largest ISO standards development meetings ever held with 386 experts attending from 77 ISO member countries.

On the basis of 5200 comments received prior to the Santiago meeting, the Integrated Drafting Task Force¹ (IDTF) identified the following key topics to be addressed at the plenary:

• International norms of behaviour,
• References to social responsibility initiatives and government,
• Sphere of influence (i.e. value chain and supply chain), and
• Picking and choosing social responsibility issues (i.e. relevance, significance and prioritization).

The committee stage is the level at which comments from national bodies are taken into consideration, with the goal to reach consensus on the technical content. These comments will be reviewed at the next ISO SR WG Plenary in Quebec City 18-22 May 2009. If successful, the document will move on to Draft International Standard (DIS). Publication of ISO 26000 as an International Standard is currently expected in September 2010.

For an update on the standard, its contents and implementation, attend ‘Corporate Social Responsibility – Acting today for sustainable business tomorrow’, a session being held at Sunningdale Golf & Country Club in London, Ontario on 3 November 2009. Speakers include TD Canada Trust and the Research Network for Business Sustainability, among others.