Material Futures
AccountAbility Forum Issue 11
The latest issue of "AccountAbility Forum", "Material Futures", looks
at how organisations manage the relevance, or "materiality", of their
non-financial impacts.
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ABOUT ACCOUNTABILITY FORUM 11
How organisations manage the relevance, or "materiality" of their
non-financial impacts, risks and opportunities appears central to the
next generation of accountability mechanisms. Determining what aspects
of sustainability are "material" to organisations has become the latest
turn in integrating sustainability into organisational practices. But
how does such materiality need to be defined if it is to deliver
against such high expectations? What are the implications of emerging
innovations in practice? And when we evaluate "materiality" are we
thinking fundamentally about businesses' performance or their impact on
the environment and society? In this issue of AccountAbility Forum, a
range of international practitioners and thinkers reflect on how they
approach materiality and where debate and practice needs to go next.
In this issue, contributors from across the globe assess the impact
that "materiality" - both as concept and methodology - has made on
organisational and particularly corporate accountability since Simon
Zadek and Mira Merme's Redefining Materiality sought to offer
diagnosis, reassurance and treatment in the form of their "five-part
materiality test".
Reducing their thoughts to one crude sentence we might summarise our
contributors' general consensus as "really useful, and a lot still to
work out". Very interesting comparisons emerge between the British,
Australian and French regulatory frameworks (Kaminskaite-Salters,
Nolan, Lake); between how materiality is handled by aid agencies
(Mitchell), consultants (our "AccountAbility Debate") and companies
(Drewell); while Lake and Powdrill show how much further there is to go
in the financial services industry.
With contributions from, among others, ABP Investments, Freshfields
Bruckhaus Deringer, Barloworld and the Overseas Development Institute,
this issue presents some of the latest thinking on the materiality
debate.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
* Editor's Note
John Sabapathy, "AccountAbility Forum"
* Making Materiality Work
Alan Knight, Head of Standards and Related Services, AccountAbility
* Materiality: Philosopher's Stone, Red Herring or Work in Progress?
Rob Lake, Senior Portfolio Manager, Environment, Social and Governance
Issues, ABP Investments
* Reflections on Accountability, Materiality, the Nature of Business
and the Challenges of Globally Responsible Leadership: The Lens from
South Africa and Barloworld
Mark Drewell, Group Executive, Barloworld
* Non-financial Materiality, Trade Unions and UK Pension Funds: What
Difference has the 2005 Pensions Act Amendment Made?
Tom Powdrill, Head of Communications, Pensions Investment Research
Consultants (PIRC)
* Disclosing Material Environmental and Social Impacts from a British
Legal Perspective: Current Obligations and Future Trends
Giedre Kaminskaite-Salters, Associate, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
* Public Policy and Non-financial Materiality in Australia
Justine Nolan, Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Australian Human
Rights Centre, University of New South Wales
* Accountability to Beneficiaries of Humanitarian Aid: Old Rhetoric,
New Messengers
John Mitchell, Active Learning Network for Accountability and
Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP), Overseas Development
Institute
* The AccountAbility Debate: Non-financial Reporting, Assurance and
Materiality
Richard Boele, Founder, Banarra, Jennifer Iansen-Rogers, Senior
Manager, KPMG Sustainability Netherlands, and Deborah Evans, Business
Manager for Corporate Reporting and Assurance, LRQA
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