The Corporate Stewardship Compass: Guiding Values for Sustainable Development

The Caux Round Table commissioned the project in the firm conviction that moral leadership is essential to building a culture of stewardship within companies – a culture which reflects the alignment of values with business practices. The Compass is especially timely given the growing expectations for private sector engagement. As never before, businesses are being called upon to apply their expertise and creativity to solving sustainable development challenges. Moreover, trends in corporate responsibility demand new commitments to environmental, social and governance standards. The Corporate Stewardship Compass, therefore, uses the UN Sustainable Development Agenda as a guide toward the values of successful stewardship. The project goal was to develop a practical tool that could be used in the real world to produce actionable insights. The chief output of the project, therefore, is an innovative questionnaire and matrix derived from the value and practices of some of the world’s most sustainable companies, which can be used as an internal checklist by companies or used by independent social auditors or consultants who conduct in-depth inside interviews in conjunction with analysing publicly available data.