This week, Pallavi Sharma, Beyond’s Agriculture, Food and Biodiversity Lead, got back from two intense days at the UNRBHR2025 forum in Bangkok last week.
Here are her reflections and highlights:
The STITCH Partnership Technical Guidance on Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement in the Garment Sector:
The Guide, which my team helped develop, launched at the Forum to wonderful response! This represents months of collaboration with the wonderful STITCH colleagues. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/ebuF-WEQ
Living wages: Largely concerned, somewhat happy. Concerned that progress is slow, very slow. Issues that we have been discussing for over 100 years (such as paying workers wages that can afford them a decent standard of living) are still being ‘debated’ in policy and industry circles; at the same time, happy that progress, though snail-paced, is starting to be visible as organizations build an evidence base, speak to stakeholders in their language, and break the attainment of living wages into incremental steps.
Participatory approaches: Real participatory approaches actually surface and strategically amplify the local expertise to ensure ownership and sustainability. Key insight that stayed with me: the exit strategy of a project should be the first thing you think about when initiating work in a community – how will the outputs and impact be sustained once the project is over?
CSDDD and the (lack of) stakeholder consultation: CSDDD misses the critical voices it aims to protect. Focus seems to be shifting toward compliance checks over systemic improvements. Meanwhile audits only look at worker complaints where they can, not the structural issues like informality and living wages that underpin many of the complaints.
A compelling point was made in one of the panels: double materiality assessments should examine de-colonialism and power imbalances – who bears the costs versus who captures the profits across the value chain? Currently, this critical information is not required to be disclosed in regulatory frameworks.
Also, how language matters! Global south vs. Global north, capacity building vs. knowledge sharing – the language we consciously choose is critical to dismantle the colonial legacies most of the systems the current world of work resides on draw from.
Last, special shoutout to the UNDP team for pulling off an agenda that actually worked – good mix of structured panels and spaces for exchanging ideas, organic networking, decent coffee, and somehow managing to wrangle all those different voices into something coherent.
See you next year!