Ten Years in Bergen: What a classroom can do

In September 2017, a small but committed group of students gathered in Bergen in Norway for the first edition of a course that was a true experiment. The Rafto Foundation and the University of Bergen had agreed, together with the Institute for Human Rights and Business, to try something that did not exist anywhere else in quite this form: a Masters-level course that would take the broad concepts of “business and human rights,” a field still relatively new and finding its footing, and apply them to the range of real world issues facing professionals working in companies as well as governments, trade unions and civi society. 

Key concepts in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights like ‘leverage,’ ‘salience of risk,’ and ‘human rights due diligence’ were coming into vogue, but what did they mean in practical situations? How were practitioners to make sense of these concepts and what were the consequences of getting them wrong?

This September, we begin the tenth edition of the course, and what a journey it has been! Last year, more than forty students enrolled. The course has outgrown every early assumption we made about who would want to sit in a room in Bergen, thinking hard about supply chains and shareholder resolutions and operating in conflict-affected and high risk areas and dealing with the impacts of business activities on the rights of people who will never sit in that room themselves.

The arc of the course tracks, in miniature, the arc of the world it teaches about. We began in person, three years running, students and faculty sharing meals between lectures, arguments spilling out of the seminar room and into the streets around Professor Keysers Gate. Then came the COVID19 pandemic, and with it, virtuality. The world stopped, but the course did not pause, it adapted, moving onto screens for what turned into two years of Zoom windows and time-zone arithmetic. And now, we are back in a hybrid form: two weeks in Bergen for those who wish to make the trip, which bookend two weeks online, a structure that lets the course do what neither format alone could: the intimacy of a shared room for the introductions and the reckonings, the reach of the internet for the breadth of voices in between. What began as necessity has become, we think, the better design. The LinkedIn group of Bergen alumni – now more than 220 of them – testifies to the success of the approach. Alumni of recent years have kept up spirited conversations on instant messaging services, planning to meet one another at various conclaves dealing with business and human rights, climate, and sustainability. We are proud to see this community of practice grow. 

The course design has not only allowed us to bring together participants we could never otherwise have assembled in one place. It has also provided the opportunity to involve a diverse group of faculty experts who have generously shared their experiences and insights. Our success has also depended on three institutions bringing different strengths to the same table. Rafto’s decades of work with human rights defenders means the course can put a Ugandan LGBTI activist or a Dalit rights campaigner in front of corporate executives not as a guest speaker but as core faculty, besides enabling defenders to participate in the classroom.

The University of Bergen gives the course its academic home and its rigour. And IHRB brings the connective tissue: our relationships across the corporate, legal, civil society, and diplomatic worlds have made it possible for a former ICRC official who has spent three decades in conflict zones, lawyers from Clifford Chance, technology experts from Telenor and Meta, mining and extractive industry executives from AngloAmerican and TotalEnergies, and sustainability leads from Equinor and Volvo to all end up on the same syllabus, along with trade unionists from Bangladesh and community rights activists from Nigeria. The course does not theorise business and human rights from a distance. It is taught by the people who practice it each and every day, often under pressure.

The individuals who sign up for the course have never fitted a single mould, and that has always been the point. They have come from Telenor and Hydro, from Barclays and Airbus, from Rio Tinto and E&Y and PwC — executives who speak candidly about their experiences. Our participants have included staff from the ICRC, from the Norwegian armed forces and the Norwegian police, from consulting firms and law offices, from social audit firms, from NGOs, and from the ranks of human rights defenders themselves, the people on the other side of the table from corporations. They have joined us from Brazil and Colombia, from Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Greece and Spain, from across Scandinavia and the Netherlands, from Kenya, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Australia. A course convened in a small Norwegian city, population under 300,000, has become, four weeks a year, one of the more improbably global rooms in the field.

What happens when you put a bank’s compliance officer, a mining executive, and a human rights defender who has been targeted by security forces in the same seminar room? Not a contrived consensus, usually. But we get something more useful than consensus: the recognition, often visible in conversations that persist long after the classes are over, that the person across the table (a corporate executive, an NGO, a trade unionist) is not an abstraction, that ‘the company,’ and ‘the community’ and ‘the defender’ are not opposing case studies but people who will, quite possibly, meet again — in a due diligence review, in a grievance mechanism, and sometimes in a courtroom.

Nnimmo Bassey, the poet and Nigerian environmental and human rights activist and Rafto Laureate who has taught on the faculty for years, put it simply: this is the course that gets to the heart of the matter. What he means, we think, is that the course refuses the comfortable distance business-and-human-rights training sometimes allows: a PowerPoint version of due diligence, stripped of the oil in the Niger Delta, the abandoned wells, the communities still waiting for remediation years after the barrels stopped coming.

Alinde Melin of Volvo, who joins the faculty this year, has told us that two of her Volvo colleagues had taken the course in recent years and recommended it unreservedly to her. That is, in its way, the most honest endorsement a course can receive: that users see real value for their work. 

And Claude Voillat, formerly of the ICRC, has written something that stays with us: that business and human rights work requires dedication and passion, and that passion “exudes from the Masters Course’s organising team, it exudes from the faculty, it exudes from the students.” The course builds on concepts and frameworks such as the UN Guiding Principles, the OECD Guidelines, and what Anita Ramasastry, former member of the UN working group for business and human rights calls ‘the alphabet soup’ of instruments that governs this field. Voillat names the harder, less measurable thing the course does: it makes the people doing this work, often alone inside their organisations, feel less isolated. Bolder. Better armed. That is not a line item in a curriculum. It is, perhaps, the actual point.

Ten years ago none of us could have predicted how the terrain would shift — mandatory human rights due diligence legislation moving from aspiration to law across Europe; AI data centres raising questions about land, water and community consultation that did not exist as a category when we started; tariffs reshaping the supply chain relationships we once took for granted; the war in Gaza forcing a reckoning with what ‘conflict-affected business’ actually means when the conflict is livestreamed.

Every year the syllabus is rewritten (for example, this year we’ll revisit the theme of sports and human rights, after the eventful FIFA World Cup), not because the foundational questions have changed, but because the world kept generating new and urgent examples of where respect for human rights must still become part of mainstream business practice.

What has not changed is the challenge that led us to found the course in 2017: that if you put practitioners, defenders, and scholars in a room, physical or virtual, for four intense weeks, and let them think, discuss,  interact and exchange ideas, something happens that a corporate training module cannot replicate. Some call it professional formation. Some prefer networking. We see it as building a global community of practice - the slow accumulation of people scattered across five continents who now share a common vocabulary, a common set of frameworks, and, as Voillat puts it, a common resilience to keep going even when times get tough.

Twenty students in 2017. Forty and more last year. Ten years, four continents’ worth of alumni, a faculty list that reads like a cross-section of everyone serious about this field. Bergen is a small city with a big heart, and it holds something large.