In two months, the Zermatt Summit Foundation will welcome 200 participants from about 20 countries for its fourth edition. During two days, senior business executives, leaders from civil society and public personalities will engage in discussions on the theme: “Business and NGOs: Building partnerships of winners”.

The program of the meeting will focus on issues and challenges where greater collaboration and synergy between civil society organizations and business would…

These days, most business leaders have had enough media training to think they know what the outside world wants to hear. And right now, sustainability is one box they are sure to tick. Ask a CEO if sustainability is a strategic issue for their firm, and you'll only ever hear one answer: yes.

Why is it, then, that budgets for sustainability initiatives are frequently so small that they appear to have been shoved in as an afterthought? Urgency to get the keyword sustainability out in…

Register now for the complimentary Verdantix webinar, Global Sustainability Leaders Survey: Budgets & Priorities 2013, on November 15^th, to understand the findings from our annual survey of 250 global heads of sustainability. Presented by Verdantix CEO, David Metcalfe, we will also share survey data on governance for sustainability spending, the authority of heads of sustainability to make decisions on different initiatives and key purchase drivers.

This unique global…

At Nestlé we believe that actions speak louder than words.  We have to deliver what we promise.  We have to be transparent if we are to persuade our stakeholders, our partners, and our critics, that we are building our business in a long-term, sustainable way. 



Significant step

This month we’ve achieved a significant step towards greater transparency, receiving an A+ rating from the Global Reporting…

"Hillary Clinton unveils initiative on clean cooking stoves," was among last year’s highlights at the Millennium Development Goals Summit. On this World Pneumonia Day, what has become of The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves? Has yet another “silver bullet” failed to make a difference for those in the…

How-matters.org is featuring two posts today as part of the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign. 

Part 1 discusses how grassroots organizations, as powerful actors that find and reach marginalized girls, are key to unlocking girls’ potential.

Because they are embedded in the communities they…

One of the most interesting developments in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the elaboration of chains of authority among the very distinct frameworks that are being developed by both public and private international organizations.  Private actors tend to produce networks of systems that are informally connected and which seek through communication and overlap to move toward convergence.  Theirs tends to be a functional approach to CSR, arranged within orders that are informal and…

Larger-scale support of local initiatives, grassroots leadership and small, often “informal”movements is a key reform needed in the international development aid sector. I shared this view in a post entitled, “…

Following the refusal by the UN Global Compact (UNGC) to accept and act on a formal complaint of “systematic or egregious abuse” of the Global Compact’s overall aims and principles by PetroChina, a UNGC participant, the NGOs that submitted the complaint plan to escalate the matter to the UNGC’s Board of Directors.



The complaint, submitted by Investors Against Genocide (IAG) and Centre for Research on…