Participatory Measurement
Where are the people in sustainability & ESG data?
Who decides what good business looks like? The legitimacy of sustainability measurement is rarely questioned. In the top-down, standardised frameworks of ESG World, it’s the standard setter, ranker or rater in Amsterdam, London or New York who decides. But sustainability impacts are bottom up: complex, dispersed, contextual and dynamic. Most fundamentally, responsible and sustainable business is about people. So where are the people in the numbers?
Let’s try to imagine a different way of doing things. Could involving people make the numbers more accurate and legitimate?
Participatory measurement is about involving stakeholders across the full footprint of commerce in the design, data generation and judgement of good business. Think farmers at the top of the supply chain, workers in factories, local communities around sites and billions of consumers. Armed with mobile phones and through facilitated engagement, stakeholders can be sampled, respond to surveys, share opinions, shape the questions, challenge the answers, create the data, review and feed back. Participatory measurement is about generating insights and numbers from sources as close as possible to where impact is felt.
Inclusive Data
This is a new type of what I call inclusive data. People’s realities – their lives and livelihoods, relationships, values and aspirations – are the real truth that sustainable business is all about. How can we possibly judge if a business is responsible, a working environment ethical or a product sustainable without asking people? We should be asking those most affected by a business to shape the numbers.
Participatory measurement should make the numbers more accurate because so many sustainability issues are personal and subjective. Inclusion, wellbeing, ethics, decent work and human rights don’t make any sense without people. Sustainable consumption, responsible marketing, affordable healthcare and recycling habits are about behaviours, attitudes, opinions and impacts. We cannot hope to understand the real imprint of business on life without constructing metrics and collecting knowledge based on real human experiences.
Participatory approaches have been used in international development for decades
Involving the Marginalised and Those Without Voice
Participatory methodologies first gained a foothold in international development in the 1990s. The poor, marginalised and those without voice input to the design, monitoring and evaluation and impact assessment of policies, programmes and projects. By aggregating views, participatory statistics provide quantitative insights into lived realities that are rigorous, comparable and insightful.
In my new book, Measuring Good Business, I explore how an idea borrowed from development could have powerful implications for business. Participatory measurement in sustainable business would invite a range of corporate stakeholders to co-create solutions. It could bring powerful, practical benefits. It can make measurement more accurate because it’s not based on abstract policies and frameworks but real, lived experiences. How do you find the work culture? How would you describe the benefits of this product? How safe is your environment? How affordable is this service? This roots our measurement in the local: real people and real places.
Too much of ESG World is focused on the abstract, top-down numbers. Policies, processes and programmes from spreadsheets held in offices far removed from the sites of impact. If we are serious about measuring impact, we have to get closer to where impact is felt.
The influence of a corporation is best measured through sampling what people think, know, see, sense and feel on the ground. This shouldn’t replace the traditional measures based on top-down corporate disclosures. It should complement them with richer insights into reality. The influences of business are so widespread, and the contexts so diverse and dynamic, that sampling stakeholder perceptions is the best way to understand the impact of business on the world. It’s time for a revolution in the numbers. It’s time to involve people in measuring good business.
If you are interesting in learning more about this idea, please check out the book: Measuring Good Business.