Rightsholder engagement
Rightsholders – the workers, community members and others whose human rights may be affected by business activity – are at the heart of effective human rights due diligence. Genuine engagement with them is both a core requirement of the UN Guiding Principles and, in practice, one of the most challenging aspects of HRDD to get right.
Rightsholders are not a homogeneous group. They include workers across tiers of the supply chain, seasonal and migrant workers, smallholder farmers, community members living near operations, and many others who may have very different needs, vulnerabilities and capacities to engage. Reaching them, creating conditions in which they can speak honestly, and ensuring their perspectives truly inform decisions requires deliberate effort and appropriate expertise.
How we help
We help organisations to understand who their rightsholders are, how to reach them in ways that are safe and meaningful, and how to build rightsholder perspectives into their human rights due diligence processes.
What this involves
- Rightsholder mapping alongside supply chain and risk assessment work
- Design of appropriate engagement processes for different rightsholder groups
- Support to analyse and act on rightsholder feedback
- Integration of rightsholder perspectives into risk assessment, action planning and reporting
