VISION AND OUTCOMES

IHRB's vision is a just, regenerative global economy where:

  • Workers and communities are free and able to use their voices effectively to ensure their rights are respected.
  • Businesses demonstrate respect for the rights of workers and communities, and the natural systems they depend on, in their purpose, operations, relationships, and value creation.
  • Financial actors use their leverage to increase the scale and performance of their partners’ commitments to human rights and the environment.
  • Governments actively implement a smart mix of measures that drive long-term, rights-respecting, and planet-aligned business practice.

 

MISSION AND OBJECTIVES 

IHRB's mission is to make human rights part of everyday business by shaping policy, advancing practice, and strengthening accountability.

This includes the objectives of: 

  • Shaping Policy: Local, regional, and international policies and legal systems reflect the learnings and recommendations from IHRB’s and partners’ research, engagement, and experience.
  • Advancing Practice: The actions of the businesses and governments IHRB and our partners engage reflect the rights-based approaches we advocate and work to strengthen over time.
  • Strengthening Accountability: IHRB’s and partners’ engagement with businesses and governments leads to greater responsibility for and action to address known human rights harms.

 

APPROACHES 

IHRB deploys a mix of human rights-based research, engagement, and collaborative action with businesses, governments, financial actors, and representatives of civil society. We have developed a track record of independent analysis as well as constructive interventions and collaborative engagement with all constituencies, earning a reputation as a trusted organisation committed to working with all actors to identify practical solutions and approaches needed to effect positive change. These include: 

  • Scanning the horizon to identify gaps and emerging issues

  • Developing evidence to advance global norms and standards

  • Driving dialogue and breaking down silos

  • Advocating for better laws and stronger forms of accountability

  • Dynamically communicating across diverse mediums

  • Teaching and training the next generation of leaders

 

FOCUS AREAS

IHRB addresses some of the most important and emerging human rights issues facing business. For the period 2023-2025, our core focus areas include: just transitions, dignity in the built environment, responsible commodities, migration with dignity, and sustainable oceans. 

The human rights risks and opportunities within these areas are often interlinked. We seek to ensure our teams are as cross-functional and integrated as possible, while offering specific expertise within each area where our approaches can add most value in a given sector or context.

  • Just Transitions: Advancing rights-based approaches to key sectoral net-zero transformations, informed through place-based research and informing norms and standards development for greater global coherence, comparability, and accountability across the growing array of just transitions claims and commitments.
     
  • Dignity in the Built Environment: Innovating rights-based approaches at the project-level of the built environment to demonstrate social and economic value, while targeting broader systems change and building industry standards through government and investor policy reform.
     
  • Responsible Commodities: Catalysing actors throughout the commodities value chain – from extraction and trading companies to manufacturers, refiners, transporters and end users – to address adverse human rights impacts across global markets.
     
  • Migration with Dignity: Leveraging responsible business to protect, respect, and fulfil the rights of migrant workers in all industry sectors and locations, ensuring migrant workers everywhere are treated with dignity.
     
  • Sustainable Oceans: Equipping actors across the ocean-based industries to meet their human rights responsibilities, through outcome-focused dialogue and ecosystem building that centres the voices of the indigenous groups, communities, and workers at risk.

 

CROSS-CUTTING LEVERS

Across our core focus areas outlined above, IHRB works to understand and utilise a number of cross-cutting levers that are key enablers (or disablers) of progress on human rights. 

  • Finance: Working with investors, banks, insurers, and other financial actors to ensure capital is allocated toward rights-respecting and planet-aligned economic activity.
     
  • Intersectionality: Working with business, finance, government, and civil society actors across sectors to take more holistic approaches to power dynamics and their implications for identity-based discrimination.
     
  • Law: Working to drive greater and more effective hard- and soft-law mechanisms on responsible business within local, national, regional, and international legal systems.
     
  • Technology: Working with ICT companies and other key actors to ensure technological advance and connectivity is delivered while respecting human rights.

 

OUR GLOBAL TEAM

IHRB has registered charitable entities in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and the United States of America, but our work transcends local, national, and regional boundaries with partnerships and projects around the world. 

IHRB has a globally distributed team of staff and representatives currently based in: Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Denmark, France, GCC, Germany, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

The “IHRB family” now includes five independent organisations (IHRB, CREER, MCRB, CHRB, and CSHR) which all cooperate to achieve IHRB’s vision and mission. They have different legal structures which have been designed to suit the purpose of their work, the safety of their staff (in the case of Myanmar particularly), and to optimise funding arrangements. 

 

IHRB's 2023-2025 Strategy

IHRB’s 2023-2025 Strategy is informed by over a decade of experience since our founding in 2009, and is shaped by the knowledge and expertise of our global network of leaders, practitioners, and activists across business, finance, government, and civil society. 

It is a living document, capturing IHRB’s current thinking and approaches to making human rights part of everyday business around the world, but also expected to evolve over time.

This Strategy is also a directional document. It provides an overview of: 

  • Our view of the global context in which our vision and long-term outcomes must be rooted
  • Our mission-driven objectives of shaping policy, advancing practice, and strengthening accountability
  • Our day-to-day approaches to delivering impact

Download the full IHRB 2023-2025 Strategy for more information about our view of the global context, the key assumptions and core principles we bring to our work, examples of IHRB in action over the years, our monitoring and evaluation efforts, and governance structures. 

Document design by: Declarative Labs