What practical challenge will the workshop tackle

Capacity building is how due diligence expectations become practice. Yet evidence on whether and when it works is thin: what makes it effective remains unsettled.

Who should attend

Practitioners who build capacity on responsible business conduct for at least one target audience (e.g. companies, governments, employer and business member organisations, workers’ organisations, civil society organisations). Two things are required: experience with capacity building on responsible business conduct, and a commitment to actively participate.

Overview

What makes capacity building on due diligence and responsible business conduct effective? Working in facilitated groups, participants discuss this question together, using examples of programmes they know first-hand (including their own) and have chosen to bring to the table. The discussion is structured around a short set of claims to test, drawn from research and experience to date. There are no panels, and no presentations beyond a short opening framing (including brief grounding remarks from two or three users of capacity building): the material of the session is the participants' own experience.

Background

Demand for capacity building on responsible business conduct and due diligence has never been higher, and supply is expanding with it. Capacity building is the mechanism through which due diligence expectations lead to change in practice, though evidence on which approaches produce sustained change is limited. What the field does have, today, is practitioners' first-hand experience.

Activities

After a short opening frame presenting claims drawn from research to date, grounded by brief remarks from two or three users of capacity building, table groups work three timed rounds: grounding the claims in programmes participants know first-hand, ideally their own; testing and amending them against that experience; and naming the evidence that would settle the strongest disagreements. A briefed facilitator supports each table; the session closes with patterns across tables and voices from the tables.

What participants will gain

• A structured comparison of how peers across the region make due diligence training stick: the ingredients, delivery approaches, resources and follow-up involved, and how change could be measured;

• Programme assumptions (participants' own included) tested against a mixed room of practitioners;

• An overview of ideas for making capacity building more effective, to take home and hold their own work against;

• After the Forum, an anonymised analysis of the room's findings: which claims held, where disagreements lie, and what evidence would resolve them.