Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being here. It's it's a real pleasure to be part of visiting researcher with the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business. So my name is Kyla Raby and I'm from the University of South Australia in Adelaide, in in Australia and soon the University of South Australia will actually become Adelaide University.

We're going through quite a significant merger with another University of Adelaide in our state. And so as of 1st of January we've become Adelaide University, but it's a real pleasure to be here. I'm here in person with you because of very fortunate to receive a scholarship from the University of South Australia because it is a partner university with Lancaster University. And so, it's really great to be able to kind of continue the partnership that I believe was established quite a long time ago.

So, I'm going to be talking to you about my PhD research. But before I do, I'd just like to acknowledge that I come from the lands of the Kaurna people in South Australia and to pay my respects to eldest past, present and emerging. And you might notice that this kind of map of Australia before it is a indigenous Australia map and the circle that I have in read is where Adelaide is on the lands of the Kaurna people. I think we have some people joining from online from Australia as well. So just to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands that that'll be dialling in from today as well.

So, before I get too much into my research, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself, so I am I'm not sure if you use this term in the UK. I've heard it for the first time in Australia a couple of weeks ago, but I'm a pracademic so I am new to the area of academia, but I have a long background as a practitioner in the humanitarian space.

So, I've worked for the best part of the last 15 years for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement with various components of that movement. So, I've worked for the British Red Cross here in the UK about 10 years ago leading asylum seeker and refugee support programmes across the middle of England. I was deployed with the British Red Cross to Greece as part of the European refugee crisis and I was supporting victims of survivors and people on the move migrates on the move through Europe as part of that response. And I've also been deployed with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society to Bangladesh in Cox’s Bazar, the world's largest refugee camp. And as part of those roles, I've been working with vulnerable groups and communities, including people who've been trafficked. And my most recent role with this relevant cross and I've held for about six years in the Australian context, was leading a Survivor Support Service and National Survivor Support Service called the Support for Traffic People Programme, which, if you're familiar with the NRM here in the UK, is the Australian equivalent to that so.

This is the background that I come from and I guess it's. I think it's important to disclose that because it's how I approach my work. I really come from perspective thinking about what does modern slavery look like in communities? How does that impact people? How did the laws and the policies that we develop in response to this issue actually make a difference to the people who are being exploited? So I have a real passion for thinking about how research can help drive policy, better policies and better laws, and and vice versa. How experience from practitioners can help drive better research.

So when in my role at Australia Red Cross, I actually moved from the UK back to Australia in 2018 in the November and about 3 weeks later Australia passed our Modern Slavery Act. Now I've been living over here in the UK when your Modern Slavery Act was passed in 2015, so I was quite excited to see Australia do something similar and there was a lot of celebration in a sector that the Australian government had taken such a big step to, you know, for the first time, really look at regulating modern slavery in global supply chains. However, very quickly, within a couple of weeks I be given that my role at this young Red Cross was as lead for human trafficking and forced labour and forced marriage.

I was quickly brought into conversations about how the organisation was going to respond because even though the Red Cross is an NGO, they had, their method reporting threshold and therefore was a reporting entity under the Modern Slavery Act. So all of a sudden I went from, you know, developing very and leading and managing, you know, casework services and very operational projects to having conversations about supply chains and it was the first time I've ever really had conversations about supply chains and I learnt very quickly that actually implementing the Modern Slavery Act in a way that would have meaningful impact was going to be very challenging because of the legislation itself. So, this is what really sparked my interest in the Modern Slavery Act and looking at it from a research perspective.

So just to give you a bit of a quick context on Australia's Modern Slavery Act, if you're not familiar with it, it is a reflexive, non-punitive transparency focused law. So essentially, we took your Section 54 from the UK Modern Slavery Act.

And we decided to ignore the rest of the UK Modern Slavery Act, so our Act does not have criminal penalties. It does not have any survivor support initiatives. It is entirely a transparency in supply chain legislation. It also didn't, when it was passed back in 2018, did not have an anti-slavery Commissioner, that was only just added last year through an amendment, so it it really functions quite differently to your legislation, but essentially was really inspired by that Section 54 of the UK Act.

We do also have, of course, other criminal laws that do exist around human trafficking and slavery offences that have been around for the best part of the last 20 or so years, and we have a whole other kind of realm of legal frameworks around Fair Work, Migration, Family Law that have relevance to the subject matter of exploitation of people in Australian context. So that's just a very whistle stop tour of kind of legislative environment and but just to say that Australia's Modern Slavery Act at a commonwealth level is the first piece of legislation that is ever being designed to target the exploitation of people in the context of global supply chains. So, there is another piece of stack-based legislation we have a Modern Slavery Act out of New South Wales level as well, but this is the first kind of commonwealth, you know, federal piece of the world.

So now just to kind of think about more the the problem of modern slavery. So, you would have seen in the title of my presentation, I'm using this word problem in quotation marks because I guess what I want to stress is that the way that we represent problems in law and policy has a big impact on the choices that we make in response. However, we often jump straight into solving the problem mode without really carefully thinking about the way that the problems are represented. And so my research really focus on on this concept of how we represent problems in law and policy. There's also often a disconnect between the problem that policy makers propose to solve and what the problem is represented to be within that law or policy.

So through my my research, I use a framework that's developed by another South Australian academic, Carol Bacchi, and who has developed this framework for unpacking specific representations of problems called ‘What's the problem represented to be’ WPR?
Excuse me. So WPR is a post structural approach to critical policy analysis, and I think it can be really helpful to unlock new ways of thinking about complex policy issues like modern slavery.

However, analysts from very different fields, so from criminology, from health, from business, have really been using this WPR methodology to critique policy and legislation in a whole range of fields. So it's a very diverse and I guess very, very it can be used in lots of different contexts this methodology.

Without giving you too much detail about it, I'm just going to just give you a very quick overview of what it looks like, because I think it's important to give you that context for how I've used it in research. So, I used WPR as a systematic methodology for analysing and then for disrupting the problem representations that are implicit in Australia's Modern Slavery Act. This is essentially what the WPR methodology is made-up of, of six different questions. I'm sorry, there's a there's actually an updated version with seven questions, the 7th bang of a reflexive one asking you to apply this list of questions to your own problematisations, but essentially you know it's called. What's the problem represented to be? Because that is the first kind of kick off question in this methodology that then helps you dig deeper and think about, how did this come about? What are the underlying assumptions that this, this problem has?

What is left unproblematic? Where are the silences and how can it be thought about differently? So, this is what I've done in my research. So just to get more familiar with this concept of problematization, I'll just tell you that a core proposition of WPR is that what we propose to do about something indicates what we think needs to change and hence what we think is problematic. So, the way that this translates in reality is that, for example, if training courses are offered to women as part of a policy to increase their representation in better paid occupations or in positions of employments. The problem is actually represented to be audience lack of training. So … So, you can see why I guess this applying to a really basic example, how it really kind of splits the thinking about well actually is this an effective policy or not? And essentially what the policy proposes to do as a solution if you reverse that, it tells you what the policy represents as the problem.

So now let's apply that to Australia's Modern Slavery Act. So what is the problem represented to be within it? So, this is directly from the legislation, the simplified outline of the Act is that the Act requires entity is based or operating in Australia, which have an annual consolidated revenue of more than $100 million to report annually on the risks of modern slavery in the operations and supply chains and actions to address those risks. Other entities based and operating in Australia may report voluntarily.

So this is from Section 3 of the Modern Slavery Act, so essentially the Act suggests that large revenue generating entities, disclosing information about their practises is the solution. Therefore, the Act represents the problem and the lack of information about business activities.
So Bacchi in her methodology encourages you to dig deeper once you kind of uncover a surface. You know, representation of the problem. And in Australia's Modern Slavery Act, this information has a purpose. It has an intention. There's an intended audience for it.
So a specific aim of the Act is to assist consumers to make more informed decisions when using, buying and selling goods and services. This is from the explanatory memorandum of the the bill that became the Modern Slavery Act.

And then in in when in when the government was introducing the bill, the Minister who was responsible for introducing it, explained that businesses that failed to take action will be penalised by the market and consumers and severely tarnished their reputations.

So essentially, this suggests that more informed and ethical consumer behaviour is a core part of the Act's proposed solution, and therefore uninformed and unethical consumer behaviour is a core part of the problem. And that kind of leads you to the title of my presentation.

So, is that OK how does that work as a policy? And and sorry, I've got a few quotes as well that kind of reiterate how these perceived problem and solution is meant to work in reality. This is from again the Minister who introduced the legislation. He said this increased transparency will create a level playing field for large businesses to disclose their modern slavery risks, so this concept of level playing field you're probably very familiar with it. You've heard it in the UK context, and it was really used as a core justification for this particular regulatory solution.

And also this concept of a race to the top so the Minister went on and explained: “critically it will also drives a race to the top as reporting entities compete for market funding and investor and consumer support”. And finally, another quote from the explanatory memorandum producing one slavery statement may also have a positive impact on consumers purchasing when consumers choose to buy from businesses seen as ethical. So, these are just like 3 quotes from you know, I think about 160 policy documents that I looked at in analysing this problem representation that kind of demonstrate how this would perceive.

So what is not part of the Act’s problem representation? What is, you know, left as unproblematic as Bacchi would say essentially the Act representation of the problem, and uninformed and unable consumer behaviour due to a lack of information about business practises frames modern slavery in global supply chains as a market problem instead of a criminal issue. So, this is very different from all of the other legislative, legislative and regulatory interventions that the Australian Government has implemented in relation to the exploitation of people. So, for example, the criminal frameworks that I showed you earlier.

Yeah.

It also this subsequently produces businesses that's what I've called non offenders so rather than businesses being the perpetrators of exploitation of workers in their supply chain, they become non offenders. They become actually one of the entities that's in need of regulatory support. So, it suggests that businesses need this legislation in order to create that level playing field, that's you know that fairground. so that one business is not getting an unfair advantage by using slavery and exploited labour. So however, it suggests that businesses rather than the exploited workers are the ones that are in need of this this law.

It also requires consumers, as opposed to businesses change their behaviour so it it it there is there may be an sorry unassumed behaviour change through the concept of transparency in my business, but the actual intentional behaviour change that the Act envisions is through consumer behaviour, not not by business. It also deflects the capitalist economic system and global systems of labour and production from the problem frame. So, these things become not not part of of the problem.

So what are the underlining assumptions behind this? Obviously, there's a there's a range of neoliberal principles that this this is being built on, so the dominance of neoliberalism as a political rationality and form of governmentality is really evident in this thinking.

Non-interventionist and free market principles as well as principles of responsibilisation are are evident. I think what's really interesting as well is that there is an assumed correspondent view of knowledge. So, the Act assumes that the increased information about business practises which is generated by the reporting environment will correspond with truth and therefore it'll be valuable to consumers in their acts of self-governing. However, it doesn't account for the complexity or the usefulness or not of this information, or the different ways in which diverse community consumer groups may receive and respond to it.
The Act also doesn't contain any penalties for non-disclosure or for misleading disclosure, or it doesn't take any steps to qualify the information in any in any way.

So, how did this Act… how did this problem representation come about? That's one of the kind of core questions in the WPR methodology that I showed you at the beginning, and it's a part of the research that I had done. As I mentioned, I looked through a total of hundred and sixty-two policy policy documents to to kind of trace back the development of this problem representation starting from the legislation itself, so starting from the text of Modern Slavery Act and then working my way back. So I've I identified three key Australian parliamentary inquiries that occurred between 2012 and 2017 that were really fundamental, fundamental in shaping the the ultimate.

Modern Slavery Acts that came to be, then it led me to obviously your legislation in the United Kingdom, your UK Act in 2015 and then also beyond that back to the California Transparency and Supply Chain Act from 2010. Now in this process really some of the kind of key findings about how this problem representation came about was that advocacy from the private sector as well as political power power really ensured that the MSA's regulatory approach aligned with corporate interests and avoided alternative policy choices which involved, for example, stricter corporate human rights due diligence requirements, independent oversight.

For example, like I said, there was no antislavery commissioner role built into our legislation, there was no independent oversight and there's no punitive penalty. So our Act contains no financial penalties or other types of penalties for non-disclosure or non-compliance.

So you could see this trend of the political the private sector advocacy the whole way through this, tracing through the parliamentary inquiries to the UK Modern Slavery Act as well as through the the California, the development of the California legislation.

The also I so in looking at the way that Australia was inspired by the UK legislation and the California legislation I've drawn on on a concept from from policy studies around policy transfer and I've actually made the argument that a process of problem representation transfer occurred between Australia and United Kingdom. So in each jurisdiction its adoption was facilitated by neoliberal governmentality which enabled the state to signal a commitment to human rights without disrupting major corporate interests. Now, instead of the actual policy being transferred, it was the problem representation because our legislation looks quite different to yours as I've mentioned around, you know the the the functions of your holistic legislation has many different sections and many different purposes.

However, the the rhetoric and the representation of the problem is the same as as was in your Section 54, and I think just a few of these points from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was the California State government state governor, sorry in 2010 at the time that the California government passed their Act.

You can see, he says, this legislation will increase the transparency, allow consumers to make better, more informed choices and motivate businesses to ensure its main practises through the supply chain. And then Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister in 2019, when the UK government announced the development of the state register. She said this register is really important so that we can all see exactly which companies are serious about stamping out abuses and which should be avoided by consumers with a conscience. So that uninformed and unethical consumer behaviour is again part of the the representation of the problem that the policies, the laws are being proposed to solve.

So what is in my…. in my research I'm I'm arguing that this problem representation needs to be disrupted and changed, so why am I doing that? Why am I saying this? Is this is wrong and it's because of the effects of this so Bacchi suggests when thinking about effects of problem representations. To think about them in in three different ways. The first category, she says, is to really think about discursive effects. So a study of discursive effects shows how the terms of reference established by a particular problem representation set limits on what can be thought instead and, so in the Australian context, through the establishment of a discursive field which champions transparency as the solution, the Act’s problem representation has limited alternative or additional government action to address modern slavery. Now this is there's many examples I could speak to about this that I've included in my research, but just one is from the review of the first three years of the Modern Slavery Act. So there was a statutory review undertaken independently by Professor John McMillan, and it looked at the the functioning of the the Modern Slavery Act in its first three years of operation.

One of the major findings of this was that a fundamental criticism of the Act is that a transparency mechanism is, at best of, limited valued, and at worst, inherently flawed. However, whilst noting this the the the review then went on to say this is out of scope essentially for this review because we're not considering whether or not transparency is an effective regulatory solution to modern slavery of global supply chains. What we're doing is assessing whether or not the current transparency framework is effective, so, or how it can be tweaked. So, the Macmillan review, as I'm sure some of you've already read, made 30 recommendations about how to increase a transparency mechanism, it really didn't consider is a transparency mechanism effective in itself. So, this discussive field really has limited that. Another example is that we actually had a piece of legislation passed in one of our Houses of Parliament a few years ago that proposed to amend the Customs Act to ban the importation of goods made of forced labour into the Australian market, and unfortunately you didn't pass our second House of Parliament because the government at the time decided they would prefer to stick with a transparency model of regulation and that Modern Slavery Act was sufficient. Even though there's been so much research and evidence just to say that modern slavery is such a complex issue that it requires a whole multitude of regulatory responses in order to address it effectively. So, another one of the categories of effects that Bacchi encourages WPR analysts to think about is around subject subjectification effects.

So Bacchi and her colleague Goodwin, who does a lot of work on this theory with her, they suggest the need to consider how subjects are implicated in problem representations and how they produced as specific kinds of subjects. So, the Act’s problem representation produced the citizens as neoliberal subjects who are rational beings with a moral accountability for modern slavery. So, this subjectification of consumers really deflects responsibility for preventing modern slavery away from businesses and it puts also deflects responsibility for regulating business activity away from the state.

There's also a lot of research around consumer engagement, awareness of modern slavery that that that suggests that this is not the case, that we're not neoliberal, you know, more citizens and some of my own research around consumer engagement. So, I'll talk about a little bit later on also challenges this moral accountability that that is assumed consumers will have.

So I think the the third category of effects and the one that I I think is incredibly important to highlight is is the lived effects. So as a analytical category, a category considering lived effects ensures that the way in which discussing the subject patient effects translate into people's lives forms part of the analysis.

So, I think essentially what we've seen in the Australian context and I think it would be fair to say it's quite similar in the UK context that the Act’s problem representation really fails to prevent the exploitation of workers in global supply chains. I think one of the most I guess significant pieces of evidence to to support this is that the Macmillan Review found that there's no hard evidence that the Act has caused meaningful change for people living in conditions of modern slavery. It has also created the potential for consumers to be to be deceived through, you know what.. what is known as slavery washing. So, greenwashing in the environmental movement. But you know, businesses being able to talk about what they're doing to prevent ethical, so to to prevent worker exploitation and whether or not that is actually true, you know has has been a a big conversation in this other context.

So given all these things, this is…. this is why in my research I argue that the Act problem representation really does need to be disrupted and replaced, and I make the case for how we can do this based on Bacchi’s methodologies. So should I actually really suggest that engaging perspectives which were silenced through the creation of dominant problem representations can really help to destabilise and disrupt them. So, in that analysis work that I did around looking at all the policy documents through the development of Australia's one side react to those 3 parliamentary inquiries, there was two really significant silences that that I found at no point in time did the policymakers ever choose to engage people with lived experience of modern slavery. So, workers didn't go to supply chains. There was organisations who put forward as a secondary stakeholder the views of workers, but no workers would directly engaged. There was also no consumers directly engaged in this process. Again, there was one or two organisations, I think out of I'd say.

60 or 70 that were able to represent consumer voice, but really there there was no direct engagement with consumers or even research around consumer perspectives. So in my research I've decided to engage these two groups to to find out their perspectives on on the Modern Slavery Act and I undertook a survey with 1068 Australians, which is weighted to be a representative sample, and I did this in partnership with choice, who's a consumer engagement agency in the Australian context. I then also undertook a digital focus group discussion with individuals with lived experience of modern slavery.

So, with experience of exploitation in a commercial setting for labour exploitation in the commercial setting, and I did this in partnership with the Australian Red Cross.

So, just to share with you some, some some initial findings from this, this is the part of my research that I'm really kind of digging deep in at the moment, but I can share some high level findings around what with consumer perspectives. So there was some really significant things that stood out around awareness, understanding and value. So, the majority of Australian consumers have not heard of the Modern Slavery Act. There is 35% of consumers reported having never considered whether slave or child labour had been used in an item that they purchased. Now flipping that that means 65% had, which I think is is a good thing. However, we had some quotes that are, oh this one, sorry.

One person saying I've read that there's currently more studying on Earth now than ever before, so there was some indication from some consumers of a level of awareness. But then we also had this quote here that some some people kind of really challenging that assumption that consumers have a moral responsibility for modern slavery, so this point saying neither child or slave labour is inherently unethical. While it is often usually performed unethically in an exploitive way, there's no real reason why it could not in principle be done ethically by the right people. So I think this, you know, is is a very different view, but you know it shows that that assumption that moral that consumers hold this moral accountability and responsibility for modern slavery is not necessarily a a broad assumption that you can apply to everybody, but also I think this this last statistic that I have on this slide about the levels of awareness of how worker exploitation occurs in consumer products changes significantly depending on the products.

So for example, 69% of consumers identified clothing as a product that came to mind when they thought of …thought of worker expectation and I think we all know things like the Runner Plaza collapse in Bangladesh and the really, really the incredible efforts of lots of advocates in the fashion industry to raise awareness of modern slavery welfare especially in that industry, seems to be really working based on that statistics. Whereas only 1% of consumers identified solar panels is coming to mind, when we know that there's really extreme risks of labour expectation in particular forced labour from the weaker population means that the development of solar panels. So noting that this assumption around consumer behaviour change that is embedded in the Modern Slavery Act, applies to all reporting entities, whether they're consumer facing or not. And and whatever industry that they're in.

So some of the other kind of findings from this research around consumer purchasing behaviour so consumers consider the reliability, price, environmental sustainability and quality of product service more than they consider ethical sourcing and manufacturing and the welfare of employees that make the product and provide the service. Now this is aligned with other research that's kind of very found, very similar outcomes that there's many more competing priorities on a consumer's purchasing behaviour and that unfortunately often unethical considerations, whether that's workers or environmental both are not top of that list.

So the simple quote someone saying I choose the product with best bang for my back and not most longevity. Consumers are also reported in this survey as being more likely to avoid purchasing something due to ethical concerns they're to seek out an ethical brand. So again, this assumption that's in the legislation that consumers will go and support ethical brands from what the research is saying is actually consumers are more likely to boycott a brand if they think that it hasn't done the right thing. And also I haven't actually got a slide about this, but in our focus group discussion with workers with lived experience, they did actually report while looking at two modern slavery statements that when a entity had disclosed higher risks of one slavery, they reported choosing to boycott that one because they assumed that because the other entity hadn't disclosed those risks, but they didn't exist. So, it almost had the opposite effect that the intent that the legislation intended on, you know, report self-reported consumer behaviour.

So, however, here's his statement by a consumer saying everyone should boycott businesses who take advantage of their workers. Another key thing that came out was around what consumers who consumers perceive are responsible. So consumers really say it's primarily primarily the responsibility of governments to ensure products and services sold in Australia are not made using using exploited workers and 80% believe that Australian businesses should be legally required to know to ensure that they know what they sell is not made from slaves or child labour. So a couple of quotes, “I believe it starts with big guns not allowing it before it ever goes to the consumer”.

And “there should be a tax on businesses who offshore work to another country that would otherwise be done here in Australia”. So again, this really pushes back from that responsibility that places placed on consumers in the legislation.

Now looking to the findings of the lived experience focus group. Some of the perspectives that came through here.

I think I've chosen to include this quote from a participant who says “modern slavery laws help the exploited victims to get justice and help them get their freedom and live a better life”. And because I think one of the key findings from this piece of the research that stood out for me was that there's a real significant disconnect between what the Act does and what people with lived experience of modern slavery think that a law addressing modern slavery should do. When asked what they know about the Act, participants identified it as containing a serious criminal offence and measures to protect the people who get exploited and encourage victims to raise their voice. As we know, unfortunately it doesn’t.

A participant also, I thought so this is really, really interesting. A participant also assumed that modern slavery statements which we showed them were intended for workers, not consumers, so they assumed upon first looking at these statements that they contain the information about workers rights and entitlements that were really to help workers make decisions about the employees that they were going to go work for or not, and they were quite surprised when we explained no, this is not not intended for workers, it's intended for consumers.

Another really significant thing that stood through in this piece of the research was that empowerment of work is its key in reducing labour exploitation. So, in thinking about how can we design better regulatory interventions to address modern slavery in global supply chains?
This this group of participants really said that workers are the best source of truth as to what the labour conditions are within an organisation. Therefore, speaking directly with work is essential. Now it's really great to see, you know, especially 10 years on in the UK and seven years. So seven years, yes, seven years on in the Australian context.

The involvement of worker voices is significant part of the conversation now around regulating got, you know, business activity in this space and however I think the way that it was done is is at the moment still is very diverse since I've seen some really good examples of it and some not so great examples of it. But essentially what people were saying to me was that they will try to hide a lot of things just so you know, they don't get exposed as much. They'll try to cover up things, they'll blame it on the workers, the employers, you know, so this was an example of some of this cover up culture, which workers told us about, and they were really saying that worker voice and perspective can help to counteract this cover up culture within many businesses where exploitation conditions, exploitative conditions are swept under the carpet.

So making sure that there's those direct mechanisms for worker voice and that they are there is trust in those mechanisms and that they're safe for workers to access, I think is a really key thing. So, another quote, I believe if they speak directly to the employees, they'll also be able to find a whole lot more of the things that are going around in the workplace.

So, that that's the end of my research. I'll just now I guess just to finish off, just talk very quickly about alternative public representation. So based on this these findings, what I'll be doing to kind of finalise my research is is proposing how we can think about regulating in this space in a more effective way, but I just wanted to apply a few of the other regulatory initiatives that exist right now to this kind of problem-solving methodology. So, for example, the forced labour regulation, the EU forced Labour regulation. If we're to think about that at a very, very high level, what is the policy you're proposing to do? It's proposing to prohibit products made with forced labour from being sold on the EU market, and they're putting this forward as the solution. So, applying it to this, what's the problem represented to be the sale of goods being made with forced labour on the EU market is the problem. So that seems to be more aligned with addressing modern slavery in global supply chains. However, it's not actually saying the production of those bills is the issue or the fact that workers are being exploited in those issues. It's saying the sale of those on the on the EU market is the issue, so sorry, is the problem.

Yeah, I don't. I don't think that's. I think there's still some really great value in that. However, I just want to put it out there as opposed to another example one, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but the approach that exists in Brazil, in where they have something called a dirty list, So what this policy proposes to do is that the Brazilian government on a semi regular basis, I think it's once a year or once every two years actually publishes a list of employers who have been found by government inspectors, inspectors to be subjecting workers to the conditions analysts my pronunciation today. Excuse me to slavery and banning them from acquiring credit from straight state-owned banks and they they're proposing this as a solution. So you flip that. What is the problem? Employers who have subjected their workers to slavery and the state financial and the state financial supporting these businesses is the problem. So, I think here we have something that's much more aligned with what we know how modern slavery occurs. And you know who are the perpetrators of modern slavery in global supply chain?

And it is employers and it is, you know, businesses. So, I I just want to leave it there in, in terms of thinking about that. But I guess one one final thought based on my background and the desire that I have that I explained to the beginning to to ensure that the way that we use research has impact in in real life what was one of the things I've done with this research in the last few years is I've looked at the Australian government's National Action Plan to combat modern slavery, and one of the aims of that action plan was to engage consumers.

Now, although I think there's an issue in terms of the way the Modern Slavery Act represents the problem and the responsibility that puts in consumers, I do still believe there is a role for consumers. There's a role for everybody, you know, modern slavery is a very complex issue that requires multi stakeholders to respond.

And so I used some of these findings from my consumer research to propose to the Australian government that they needed to to do some work around engaging consumers in this space and helping to address some of those barriers around awareness and understanding of modern slavery. And so, they they agreed and they funded a project called Everyday Slavery, which is a strategic social media project designed to engage with and educate the public as both consumers as well as citizens on modern slavery. So, this project received part of funding from the Australian government through the National Action Plan for two years from August 20, 2023, to June last this year. A couple of months ago and I've been running out across Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, so you can see that there's the hack, the hashtag if anyone wants to join. So, the hashtag was, of course, don't even know the handle. That's what I'm going to say.

They handle everyday underscore slavery, and you can find it on those three platforms. But what I wanted to highlight is that I've created a bunch of videos about how slavery turns up in our everyday lives in the production sense that we consume on an everyday basis. So, these are all available on YouTube. So, if you're ever doing any training or presentations that you want to kind of show that perspective, you're more than welcome to jump on and link those in you so it's in your presentations, they'll be there permanently. And my aim with this was really to get to try to start to overcome some of those barriers around consumer awareness and understanding of modern slavery.

I will finish there and have you just take any questions.

Thanks so much for having me.

[Beatriz] So hello everyone! Today I'm presenting my research. Design for social innovation impact: An exploration on design-led evaluation practice inside SMEs.

So a brief introduction of myself. I'm Beatriz Bonilla Berrocal I'm a PhD candidate in Design.

I'm part of a Polimi DESIS Lab which is the research lab on design and sustainability inside Politecnico di Milano.

I'm also a teaching assistant at the design Department of Politecnico di Milano at Management Department of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.

I'm here for a visiting period inside LICA and in Lancaster University. My supervisors from Politecnico de Milano are Annalinda De Rosa and Valentina Auricchio they are both professors and researcher on design.

They are both part of Polimi DESIS Lab and they are handling research projects in Europe across the topic of, on foods and food sustainability and creative industries, and how to apply design methods and participatory methods inside those industries.

My supervisors here at Lancaster University are researchers Elisavet Christou from Management Department and Pinar Ceyhan from LICA Department of Design Department.

And here I'm presenting my research lab which is Polimi DESIS Lab.

As I was saying before we work with the topic of design for social Innovation and sustainability. We go deep on the topics of innovation and co-design processes for facilitating participatory approaches in design research with communities towards more sustainable livelihoods.

Then so far we are present in 32 countries all over the world we are confirmed by more than 8,000 students and we are developing more than 100, sorry, 400 projects in the terms of design and innovation, design for social innovation, sustainability and environmental sustainability.

So the origin of my PhD research is by the governmental call in Italy which is 'Made in Italy Circular and Sustainable'.

For the ones that know a little bit of Italy, Made In Italy sector is very important in terms of the craftsmanship and excellence of the products that they are dealing with.

So because of that our research lab, which is Polimi DESIS Lab, entered into this governmental call in order to develop another perspective on sustainability, which could be social sustainability, and how to in - this is the origin of my PhD - how design can led to evaluation of design for social innovation initiatives inside the small and medium enterprises. Which is a topic that has not been explored from a design perspective.

So a little bit of like the breaking down of the topics.

Why design?

Design in terms of business and innovation is gradually expanded their area of operation and that has been recognised more and more as an innovation and competitiveness enhancer inside those environments.

Why social innovation in small and medium enterprises?

Because by doing so, by those initiatives we are integrating economic, social and cultural values into our strategies and initiatives in order to have a positive impact in society, and even beyond.

Then because of this and sadly, from a design perspective and sometimes even from other perspectives, other disciplines, there is a lack of understanding of what social innovation really is, and why the initiatives of related to social innovation have not really understand from a point of its multi-dimensionality.

Usually all the impact that we are looking at is merely in terms of economic impact, while the others as important as social is a little bit behind.

Then why to have a design-led evaluation? There's a need of creativity in evaluation practice.

Since most of the approaches from the evaluation are not coming from a creative or participatory approach, and rather there are staying more, in something more fixed, not flexible enough to allow the people inside companies to really understand what evaluation is, then the exploration into this topic is, needs to be enhanced. And also it could benefit from a design perspective approach.

Then a little bit of the context, which is really big.

I will be dividing it into six main topics which is Italian SMEs and social innovation.

Then the social innovation measurement field overall, the design perspective and evaluation, then the part, that I'm happy to find here as well, the creative participatory evaluation.

Then the need for changing the terminology from a measurement to evaluation perspective, and then a little bit of made in Italy and social businesses.

So first, in terms of Italian SMEs.

There has been, as I was saying, a change in how innovation is perceived and then more and more the enterprises are taking more care about, like the emphasis, that they are placing in terms of societal impact and what they are generating inside communities.

And then how uh especially in Italy, but I believe also in the UK, SMEs play a key role in driving economic growth and fostering innovation all over the countries.

So since in Italy it's a key factor for the innovation ecosystem, there's a need also for them to continue and monitor more and more the initiatives that they are placing towards the social innovation realm and the communities where they are working with.

Then the social innovation measurement field in general.

We can say we can see that there's many instruments, many methodologies, many tools that has been, uh, understood and research about in terms of quantifying what is really too, is really difficult to understand, like the social phenomena, and trying to convert them into something more quantified.

But this is generally what the tools and assessment methods are, are looking for. And they are leaving behind and they are failing in representing the holistic aspect of social innovation.

So, because it's really complex and then since also seeing a little bit of literature measuring social impact was originated from a positive approach, which in a way define social innovation as a product or as a service, instead of like looking at social innovation as a complete process that has like different, uh, stages and then trying to measure it in just a data, in a number, is really like a small perspective of how it could be in reality.

Then why having a design perspective of evaluation? There's a need, um, of design approach in terms of assessing the impact of interventions.

Usually as designers and design companies we don't have any structured method of how to measure the impact that we are generating towards our products and services.

And we, in turn, end up in generating our own methodologies that usually are not very structured.

So, uh, since the role of evaluation in design theory and practice has not been explored, at the end it end up in being like fragmented approaches on how to deal with evaluation from different perspective of design such as product design, service design, experience design.

Which at the end is not really organised and has like different approaches and is not uh understandable as a whole from the design community.

So why design approach in measuring social impact is valuable? Because we as designers, we focus on understanding behaviours, human behaviours.

And also we focus on the contextual factors that could be also be part of the context where the social innovation is developing.

So it's important for us as designers to be also involved in this type of, uh, processes to really have like another perspective on the topic.

Then the challenges so far, in terms of Italian SMEs, um, as I was saying, there's a need of monitor, and they don't have now, right now like the, the ways of doing so.

In terms of social innovation measurement field, we need a definition in terms of changing from more a quantitative approach to a more qualitative approach.

In terms to take also into account the ones, the things inside the, those initiatives that cannot be easily quantified.

And, um, rather try to take it into account the ones that we can talk with the people, and tackle in a more qualitative way.

Then we need a robust approach to evaluation. As I was saying we don't have a robust one, neither a clear one.

Then in terms of creative participatory evaluation, we need the evaluation process to be more adaptable and flexible.

Here I'm happy to cite you, from Lancaster University, because it's one of the few examples that we have of groups that are dealing with evaluation, that are really exploring another perspective and proposing a new one in terms of design.

Also merging design and management perspectives, in terms of having a more flexible and holistic way of measurement of evaluation, and innovation processes and social innovation processes.

So, um, rather than having, this is something that I also highlight, rather than having just one approach, it's important to have a evaluator also take into account like different approaches that could have in terms of evaluation, and not just one single model to follow.

The importance of creativity and participatory methods, uh, allow us to have a better reflection on initiatives and also address complex issues.

To understand in a more complete way the societal impact and the value that we can generate towards those initiatives.

Then, this is something that I deal a lot when I was doing the literature review.

There is, um, those two specific topics that they usually mention when they are writing papers, is the topics of measurement and also evaluation.

Usually, they use those terminologies in different context and they, there's not like a specific clear approach of what they are referring to, when they were mentioning those in many papers.

So I wanted to take those and try to reflect on what they really mean.

And try to understand, at least from my perspective, and my research in general, I wanted to see assessment as an initial part of the measurement approach and the judgment of a project outcome.

And then evaluation more in terms of an ongoing process that is not only reflecting on the first outcome but, in general, also try to measure the long-term process and the long-term outcomes that any initiative could have.

And finally, Made in Italy and social businesses.

Um, I wanted here to explain that since I'm dealing with Made in Italy sector we, we have four As in Italy. They are dealing with the four main industries that we have in in Italy which are - I will say it in Italian then I will translate it.

Arredamento, Abbigliamento, Alimentare, Automobili. Which refer to furniture, fashion, food and, um, automotive.

So what they are dealing with this for a, is trying to enhance the production process of those industries.

However if we are dealing with this topic of social innovation inside companies I will say that the most promising one, even if the others are like very economically prosperous, I will say that food industry is the one that is linked the most with communities and traditions.

For Italian community, traditions in terms of food is really important.

So when they are dealing with this type of industries they not only look at the economically advantages of their initiatives, but also how socially inclusive, how culturally pertinent to the region it could be.

So in that, in this term the, generally the companies are paying more attention to the initiatives and the impact that they are regenerating, and trying to involve the communities to generate more value behind the like, behind the companies.

And then, as I was saying, we need to create something that is more adaptable in terms of, uh, evaluation.

More flexible to create a framework as well that could guide us in a way of doing the evaluation process.

Then this change in, at least from my research, I want to propose a change on the terminology of measurement to evaluation.

And that the real terminology that we should be using is evaluation.

That is in a way trying to tackle more aspects of what the process should be.

And then the Made in Italy social businesses, which they are, they need to be like, pay more attention to evaluation.

And also they are starting to be more compromised with the social initiatives that they are dealing with.

So also to try to organise the process for them, from a design perspective as well.

So my research objective in general is to explore a design-led participatory and creative approach to evaluation of initiatives related to social innovation, and I divide the process of the PhD in mainly three stages, which is exploration, prototyping and analysis.

In the exploration phase I wanted to search for the key elements of the actual, for the ongoing existing frameworks, that are dealing with assessing of social innovation.

Then in the prototyping, uh, I wanted to search or merge like how these best practices from the transdisciplinary approaches that we already have, how we could be integrated in a design perspective.

To finally analyse how this, this social innovation evaluation could in a way be, or enhance the actual process that we are having right now.

Okay this is the methodology that I wanted to apply, and the main research question that how can design drive like this approach to social innovation evaluation, and supporting the transformation of companies to be more socially responsible in the Italian context.

And as I was mentioning, it has like three stages which, it's mainly based on the literature review and the case studies.

Then trying to work with companies, uh, with semi-structure interviews.

So also take into account the observation and discussion with the leaders of those initiatives and of those companies to finally have uh that analysis and discussion.

And, okay, this is more or less like the process that I was having.

So, after the literature review, the initial one, I could say that the assessment, impact assessment strategies could be divided into three main groups.

Which are the cost benefit analysis, the welfare indicators and the capability approach.

Being the cost benefit analysis originated in the public sector, trying to assess the impact of the project.

Then the welfare indicators will be mainly based in analysis of life satisfaction.

And finally the capability approach as is focused on the evaluation of development of cooperation and, and reduction effort poverty reduction efforts.

These are the main stages that I could identify when I was doing the literature review.

However, when we talk about social innovation measurement we can see that the, this is the, the thing that I also find in the literature review.

There's many different terminologies they use, so at the end when you search for social innovation measurement you can find more than 100, I would say more than 1,000, different um tools, methods, assessment frameworks, etc.

And then based on this you can also filter the ones that they are, um, applied into organisational environments, or community environments, because they change a lot.

Because almost I can say that every time that they want to evaluate the impact that they are having they, in a way, also develop their own.

So for doing my research, and facilitate my life, in a way, I also try to filter the data type that they were using, also the tool type.

Because it has like many different tool types like score-cards, toolkits, diagrams.

And then try to filter if they are using, uh, they're being used in a business environment.

And if they are using in a social-oriented organisation, and then how complex is the application at the end.

Which usually tends to be very complicated, and it takes a lot of time, where at the end people is not involved.

So when we go to design and evaluation, and when we are dealing also with organisations, we can say that in design theory evaluation is not really explored in the terms of seeing how, what is our impact, at least not from a literature view, robustness point of view.

So what we can say in design is that we have a way, and we have different frameworks, uh, that help us to evaluate how beneficial, what is the value that we are bringing to an organisation?

Which is completely different to my actual point of view in my research, but it's the thing that I found that is more developed from a design perspective.

So in this case we have the design ladder, the design management staircase, the design thinking impact and design value scorecard among the, the other 10 ones.

But these are the most um used in companies.

Then, when we are talking about like company social impact, at least in Italy, and in terms of the network of University that we have in Italy, usually there's many research groups that are dealing with companies, startups, and any venture in terms of, of companies, that are dealing with trying to do reports of how beneficial or how successful are they being.

So in this case, this a diagram that was adopted from a research team, that is social innovation teams by Politecnico di Torino, and they every year release a report on the number of companies that are dealing with social innovation topics and environmental topics as well.

So here we can see highlighted the regions in Italy that are dealing the most, and they have more companies dealing with this type of topics, and we can see that there are many.

We can see that the Northern part which is located, also so the most industrial part, they are working like heavily on developing more ventures in terms of this topic.

And in the Centre, while on the South it's not really explored.

Then also from the same reports that they are developing, we have a classification of how the companies are being categorised, categorised in terms of if they are a profit-driven or social innovation driven.

So in this terminology we have like also the traditional enterprises, the hybrid organisations, the non-profit or philanthropic entities.

And it's like a clear differentiation of what are the companies looking.

And then since we already have everything organised, we just go for the ones and searching the directory, like the companies that are dealing with this type of topics that we want.

So taking into account this, I decided to work with B Corps in Italy.

Which they are already having, not only in Italy, all over the world, they already having a process of evaluation in their own, since they have to report their findings not only in social aspects but also environmental.

And then taking into a look about the companies in those regions that were already highlighted, the ones that are working towards, uh, the topic that I wanted, that was in the inside the food industry in the manufacturing sector.

Then at the end were 11, which one of them is highlighted because it's not really from Italy, it's actually from London.

But they are using the Made in Italy sector as the way of promoting their products, which is Crosta & Mollica.

And in my period here I also wanted to contact them.

But the other ones are focused on the on the Italian business sector and they are divided in the, in the regions I already highlighted before.

So, here I just mentioned some changes that I did during my research which at the end, since I come from a PhD in design ,and trying to craft something on our own when there's no many research about it is not easily acceptable from an academia point of view.

So what I wanted to do at the very beginning was trying to merge, since we already have identified the, the areas, the indicators that more than 100 tools use.

I just wanted to merge the ones that are dealing most with the topic that I wanted to cover, and then in the industry that I wanted to cover, with a design tool that is looking in a way not directly the social innovation evaluation, but the design evaluation perspective that they already have.

And since this is not something that has been explored, is really to propose it from, um, from a scratch.

So I just change the, the direction in this term.

And then, from a secondary literature review, I just understand that okay, since I already mapped all the, well not all but most, of the tools that are assessing the social innovation impact.

I just wanted to divide it into layers of purposes, time frame, orientation, land, time frame, perspective approach.

In terms to use it and highlight the 30 that are being the most used inside companies, at least in the Italian sector.

With also merging the relevant cases in terms of design evaluation uh that are also being used in Italy.

To finally also go for the relevant cases in terms of participatory approach.

So from this I really benefitted from working with the Lancaster Evaluation Group, because they already um map all, all of these approaches in terms of participatory and creative, um, approach to evaluation.

So, in a way I wanted to merge the three of them, trying to also map the relevant process taking into, sorry, coming from those spheres.

So the process from evaluation the social value, or the relevant process when created, dealing with creative and participatory evaluation.

And finally the relevant process when supporting creative and participatory evaluation from a design for social innovation perspective, and what they were favouring inside companies.

So from these three layers we can propose something different that is not based in my own thinking, but also understanding the process from other um relevant cases that are being adopted inside an organisational sphere, and especially in the Italian context.

So from this um I try to propose, that is something that is still in developing, and a framework for evaluation that in a way could help the design perspective to be more organised, in terms of the steps that we should be carrying on when we are, uh, dealing with a company that is at the same time trying to enhance their impact when, when they have a, small um social innovation initiative with a community.

So with this I proposed, like, six different stages which I won't be go I, I won't go deeper on because it has like many different applications.

So it's mainly about the exploratory mapping, which at the end will have their own indicators and the evidence collection with, at the end these methods, that we will be applying with the companies.

The strategic co-design where they want to go deeper on those already existing initiatives to try to enhance them.

The change activation where we be dealing with pilots and trying to in a way change, trying to evaluate the social change is really difficult because we need a lot of time.

However if we can do a pilot we can even see a small changes from a small, for a short term, um, point of view.

So this is just a way of trying to see if there's a small change in a short period of time.

Then if we are going to analyse it in more years probably the change
could be also higher, greater.

Then the midterm impact monitoring where we will be monitoring the changes over time.

And then finally not, no not finally, but almost finalising the sustainability check and scaling like most of the idea the perspective that the companies usually have, is to have this sustainability in terms of keep on going, keep on having this impact, but also trying to scale and not going directly, only on the company but also trying to associate the company with others that are maybe dealing with the same topic or even governmental level.

And then finally, the learning and reflection, which is very important because in terms of evaluation since the people that, that is involved in terms of company perspective is not really understanding, or not all of them are really understand the process.

This reflection is important to all of us, all, all the workers be on the same page and trying to understand and also communicate the findings, and try to adopt an evaluation culture from an organisational point of view.

And this is the same.

And then, okay, from this is very short but I just developed some prototypes in terms of structure interviews and workshops for monitoring, evaluation and sustainability.

These are just some sketches of how it was done.

And then conclusions, uh, is mainly about the shift that we need to have towards more qualitative measure, for the reasons that I was also talking about before.

We need to understand social innovation not only as a number, as a percentage, but also how we are really impacting.

And for this we need to be with the people, and really dealing with talking and involving the people inside those processes.

Then the iterative assessment and evaluation is not a one-time
process.

It's something that should be involved and inserted in the uh organisational process and the way of doing things.

And then how designers can drive change to beyond the, the areas that we usually work on.

Like involving designers in new areas like evaluation or others.

It's important for the discipline to be like greater and also explore like our capabilities in those terms.

And finally, okay, this is just a call, if someone is interested, in collaborating.

I'm working right now in this project however I also, I am also involved in two others which is directly involved with my home University, which is in Colombia, with ex-combatant communities vulnerable communities and post-conflict communities, in terms of tourism and also food, for reconciliation which is trying to assess and trying to look at those initiatives in order to find a reconciliation with the territory.

So this is another topic but it's very interesting.

And thank you very much for your attention.

[Jan Bebbington] For those of you who I have not met before, which

is now no one, but we met very briefly, my name is Jan, and I look after the Pentland Centre.

And so this is a Pentland Centre talk and this is Frida, who I work alongside in something called Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship.

So we have a, a research collaboration.

And so she's come over to visit for a few days and I thought it'd be really nice for you to hear about her journey from very unusual collaborations, through to being a PhD student in Stockholm Resilience Centre.

So - over to you.

[Frida Bengtsson] Thank you Jan and it's really nice to, to be here, and thank you for the invitation.

So I titled this 'How to Change the World' and then kind of slightly panicked because I was like, I don't really know how to change the world but at least I tried to do my best to, to change parts of the world, so I'm going to talk you through some of those, the projects and things that I've been involved in.

So if I had to define myself I would probably say that I'm an activist at heart.

So for me that sort of, it means that I strongly believe in that we can do things much better than what we do today.

And that I believe that people and corporations are willing to change, but that it needs someone or something to initiate that change.

I have broken the law. I don't take it easily, but I think sometimes that it is necessary, and I think it's also part of where I come from.

And sort of, my own activism has taken me from, you can see from these pictures, from the back of a police van, to both Poles.

I've been to the Arctic multiple times, I've been to Antarctica.

I've been discussing with Mrs Jane Rumble, who's the head of the Foreign Office, who deals with the UK overseas territories, and the lovely man on the side there is the Icelandic president.

So it's been a bit of a varied group of people but a, sort of, lovely experience in itself.

So I'm going to talk you through three things that I've been doing.

And one is the Barents Sea work that I've done.

Which is basically trying to get the Norwegians and Russians to agree on the good outcome.

It's also about saving penguins, and how you can deal with change in Antarctica, which has a very complicated geopolitical reality.

But then also how all that has sort of taken me back to school, and back to academia.

But before, I just want to say something about Greenpeace.

So I worked for Greenpeace for a long time.

After my Masters that's where I ended up. It's also a place I call home.

It's where I started my activism. And Greenpeace, as you know, I think it's a very known brand, it was founded in '71, it's a 50 year old organisation by now, in Vancouver, and based on protest against nuclear testing on the Amchitka Islands.

And the ship that they sailed out on, the Phyllis Cormack, was then sort of named Greenpeace, and that's the vessel.

So being at sea has always been a strong part of the Greenpeace history.

Now Greenpeace international is based in Amsterdam, and the Greenpeace vessels are flying under the Dutch flag, which is an important part of when you do activities, it's really sort of which flags that you belong to.

But it's the Dutch government who look, looks after the Greenpeace vessels, as was noted when the Arctic Sunrise was arrested in Russia, and people were held for over three months, because it was the Dutch government that then took Russia to court over the illegal arrest and seizure of their vessel, in the end.

So, Greenpeace is an independent campaigning organisation, independent in the sense that it only has money from its donors and some large philanthropies, but you cannot give specific money to a specific project.

It's a campaigning organisation, uses peaceful creative confrontation.

I think in terms of what people perceive as peaceful can of course vary.

I think a case of creative confrontation is recently, the example in UK Waters, when they've been placing boulders to stop trawling in marine protected areas that are being fished.

And the idea is to sort of expose global environmental problems and develop solutions, and so they believe in a green and peaceful future.

At times the peace part of Greenpeace has been very strong, especially the anti-nuclear weapon part.

Less so recently, but I think everything that goes on in Ukraine and how that links to Greenpeace's nuclear work is probably going to increase that part of Greenpeace's work.

So it consists of offices around the world. There's a few missing here, sadly, especially in Africa.

So it has 55 countries, it's a network of, in some cases it's a regional office and sometimes it's a national office.

For example I worked for Greenpeace Nordic, which is sort of the Nordic countries combined, but I was based partly in Oslo but then also in Sweden.

It has three ships: The Esperanza, which was decommissioned last year.

The biggest one that Greenpeace has ever had, 71 metres.

The Arctic Sunrise which you see on the picture, it's an icebreaker.

And then of course the Rainbow Warrior ,and this is the third Rainbow Warrior.

The first one was sank, sadly, in Auckland.

The second one, you were almost possible to poke a hole through it so it had to be decommissioned.

And now recently they also bought a sailing yacht, while they're waiting to see if they're going to build a new vessel.

But that sort of, that is, is Greenpeace.

It is a truly global organisation.

Works very top down compared to, I think, organisations that are maybe more grassroots and more franchised.

Greenpeace has 80% of what all offices do has to be decided by the global programme.

So you only have the 20% possibility to sort of adapt to local issues.

But that means that if you are going to work on the Amazon rainforest all offices then combine like work together on projects related to the Amazon rainforest.

And I think that's especially important when we live in a very interconnected world, where we see that paper or pulp for example coming from the Boreal forest in Sweden, or in Canada, gets used as toilet paper in maybe hundreds of countries around the world.

So that, kind of, is part of I think what Greenpeace has been very efficient over the years is that ability to sort of focus.

But now I'm going to take you to the Barents Sea.

I don't know if you know where that is. It's the sea that lies between the tip of Norway and the Arctic Ocean.

And it hosts the largest cod fishery in the world, so if you've had any cod or any haddock lately it's more likely come from this fishery.

This is a very long and sort of wordy title or something.

But we had spent a few years in the areas around Svalbard which is the Arctic archipelago of the Barents Sea.

It's halfway between the North Pole and Mainland Norway.

So we had been there to do science.

I'm going to be very honest, if you want to send the ship to the polar regions your main justification of doing that is doing science.

You don't have, sort of, so many reasons to be there if you don't want to be a tourist.

So we had engaged with sea ice scientists and offered our vessels as a platform to conduct sea ice science especially around the sea ice minimum, because that's a big sort of media event in September.

And over the years we were like, there's quite many fishing vessels in this area.

And there were like more and more of them and as far as 81 degrees North and that's very, very far north.

So we were sort of, hmm, what's going on here and it doesn't it doesn't sort of feel right to see these vessels in this area.

So we started looking into some of the science on what happens in this area, and it's actually quite dramatic.

So we pulled it together, you can look at it. The summer season so that's the summer, that's sort of when you can fish basically, because you don't want to fish when there's so much ice, has become 20 weeks longer since the year that I was born.

That's sort of quite a long, quite the big change.

We could also see that the Barents Sea has lost 50% of its ice cover, which means that there is less sea ice.

So the summers were getting longer and there was less sea ice.

We also saw that there was an increase in temperature, because of what they call Atlantification of the Arctic.

It means that more warmer water is coming up, which is a good thing for cod because cod actually really likes a bit of warmer water.

So the, sort of, the cod stock had also expanded its range in, in this area, so it was sort of a perfect storm of change that happened in that in this area.

At the same time we also came across this study which is like quite super influential.

So if you see the red and green and yellow, that's sort of, The Institute of Marine research in Norway they did sort of seabed service and started sort of looking at what kind of diversity that was on the seabed and the more red you see, the more vulnerable it is.

And that could be sea pens or sponges, or different kinds of corals, and not sort of the coral reefs we see but, little cold water coral reefs.

And there's quite a lot of red around them there's also not very much protection in this area, when we look at it, and then what's cool with some of these sea pens is because of polar amplification.

They're like two, three meters high, so it's like sea pen forest and if you see them like more further south they're much, much smaller.

So what they also did, this group of researchers, is that they looked at fishing.

So where is fishing going on, so that's the second slide where's the intensity.

The, the more red, the more fishing that was going on.

So we could see them on Svalbard. there's some, I don't think you're seeing it so well on the map, but you will see that there's some, some trawling going on around Svalbard.

So we then started looking into who are these people, what are these boats, who fished there?

So it's about 189 licensed trawlers, and they're all of this size, so there's no small boat so there's no there's not like a local fishery in any way.

This is actually a kirkella. It's a UK boat.

The quota of the cod fishing is split between Norway and Russia, and they have managed this fishery jointly, and have done so since the 70s.

And they take 90% of the quota. And 10% is then being shared with third countries and that will be the EU, the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland.

And the catches vary, about six to seven hundred thousand tonnes, but it's been as much as one million tonnes of fish - a lot of fish.

But what we also did, what we started to, we asked for information from the Norwegian Fisheries directorate about landings, and where the landings came from.

And as you see from this graph, it was very clear that these areas, over time, had become much more interesting.

So these are the areas around Svalbard. It went from being a very small proportion of the fishery to actually coming closer to sort of 12% of the landings from Svalbard.

But what we also thought, like, sort of we know sort of where they fish, we know how much they fish, but how do we get from that boat to a supermarket.

That's when we looked at this person. It might be a company you never heard of but it's the largest white fish producer in Europe, and this is a schematic map that we did over their relationship between the fishery and Espersen.

And Espersen was particularly interesting because we know that they're the main supplier of fish to McDonald's.

So if you ever wonder who reads sustainability reports of corporations [laugh], I do, because that's when you figure these things out, or trade media.

But it was basically they have both the Russian side and the Norwegian side through Havisk, which is the largest trawling company in Norway.

And Ocean Trawlers, or NOREBO as they're now called, is the largest privately owned fishing company in Russia.

So there were some big guys involved in this fishery.

But we sort of, now we knew who fished, we know how much, we knew where they were, because we looked at satellite data, we know how it linked to the market so we then launched a campaign.

And this was probably a year of work but we didn't do any actions.

We sat behind our desks and investigated and we launched this report that we called 'This Far, No Further'.

And what we did was that we actually started pointing fingers at who were fishing in this area.

So instead of just having intensity of fishing we colour coded it based on the ownership, based on who owned these vessels.

So you will see the pink is NOREBO, the Russians, and the yellow and orange are the Norwegians.

This was very successful. It suddenly became very clear who, who they were.

And the demands were quite simple when we launched this report.

It was basically to say, for the fishermen, we don't want you to fish in this area.

For the fish buyers, we said we don't want you to engage with fishers that fish in this area, and the call for the Norwegian government who can regulate this area was to protect it.

So that was sort of the calls we made at that point, and of course, calling for a whole closure of Svalbard is a bit sort of dreaming big.

But if you don't dream big you will not land in the treetops, that's at least my take on it.

So after some very intense negotiations, which included the catching sector and the food processes and retailers, we actually landed this agreement.

So this is an agreement between the industry, we were not a part of this agreement.

But it was very nice to see them coming together, but it's also nice to see them using this kind of text because it showed that sort of they did take it seriously, they all signed onto it and they also very clearly stated that the precautionary principle was part of it.

So we were very happy to see this, they also established their own compliance procedure to make sure that everyone complied with it.

And when you look at who actually signed it, for me it becomes even more impressive.

So these were the signatories through this agreement.

I mean I think for anyone in the UK it's very common household names and, of course, with the big processors being part of this, we also covered mostly all supermarkets in Europe.

So we did do, we knew that this fish was also linked to sort of retailers in Germany and in France, and so on.

But by covering the fishing sector we basically sort of covered, covered everything.

So in in 2019, gladly, this voluntary agreement has now been replaced by regulation.

So it means that 10 of those areas that are mostly red are now protected, permanently, from fishing by the Norwegian government.

The whole Eastern side of Svalbard has turned into, has its own new regulation that means that you can't expand fishing from a historic footprint until you've done proper environmental impact assessment, on the impact on the seabed before.

And of course we didn't get it all protected, as we wanted t,o but I'm very happy with that, that was being landed.

And also like some of the dynamic here was that the industry didn't want to have to self, do their own compliance, so they were very keen on pushing on Norway to.

It was much more convenient for them to have the Norwegian Coast Guard looking after this agreement then themselves.

And then of course, everyone loves a bit of big news, and great news.

It was really nice to see the spread of this news, and that's of course how Greenpeace works, but it also builds that sort of confidence in that we're all doing the right thing, and I think the fishing industry is not used to getting good media cover, and I know that that, this meant a lot to them that it actually got acknowledged the work that they done.

But that was the Barents Sea. So my next example, we're going south.

It's going to be about penguins and protecting Antarctica.

I've been to Antarctica twice, and for me it's like being in Narnia, it's like truly magical and it's like really well beyond imagination.

And sadly the thing we the news we see about Antarctica is normally kind of not good news.

It's doomsday glaciers, it's emperor penguins are in decline, basically say it's a done deal without global action.

That we're going to lose those species if we don't act.

Or the doomsday glacier, if it melts we're gonna say, that's gonna be a lot.

But we also have programmes like Frozen Planet who attracts millions and millions of viewers from around the world, so it's like, it's a truly special place and but like isn't Antarctica protected? [laughs]

Like yes and no, I think, is the answer to that question.

So in 1959 12 nations signed the Antarctic treaty to safeguard the continent.

So that's for peace and scientific purposes only.

In 1978, the treaty parties at that time, because then they had expanded from 12 to some more, were concerned about the effects on fishing in the Southern Ocean.

And then, in '82 they then created the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or CCAMLR.

And they're actually meeting at the moment in Hobart, these two the weeks.

So the continent is sort of protected for peace and science, the ocean not so much.

That's where it's still allowed with activities.

So this is CCAMLR, it's covered, so the area that CCAMLR has covered, the Southern Ocean, is 10% of the world's oceans.

So it has 26 states as of last week, when Ecuador also joined, members, and the European Union.

So it's like quite many countries that are going to try to agree.

And they regularly, they look at science, and fishing, and tourism and human activities in the ocean.

Of course, in many places these things overlap.

So if you're a tourist and you come on a boat but you go on land you will be dealing with both the ocea,n and you will be dealing on, on land.

So they sort of work in tandem: CCAMLR and the Antarctic treaty.

But CCAMLR governs fishing, and it governs to the point that they agree exactly where and how much they're gonna fish, for example.

They also agreed in 2012 that they were going to create a network of marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean.

This was very forward-thinking when it came. It was almost a bit sort of 'wow can this happen? We're gonna see a network of marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean.'

Took a bit of time, and they managed to protect the Ross Sea in 2016, and after that there's been nothing.

Despite having two very, very solid proposals on the table: the Weddell Sea, which its original proposal was I think 1.8 Square million kilometres, it will be five times the size of Germany, if it were to be adopted.

And the Domain1, which is the Antarctic Peninsula. So those proposals are on the table, proposed by nations, supported by science, but countries can't agree, sadly.

So we basically only have the Ross Sea and the South Orkneys, which the UK protected by themselves, and of course the South Sandwich and South Shetland Islands are protected, but that's outside.

So, and in parallel to this sort of difficulty to agree to protect and establish this network of Marine Protected Areas, human activities are also increasingly quite rapidly in Antarctica, and there's traces of human activities everywhere you go.

Like this. We collected five tons of waste when we were down there.

Of course this major piece in the middle took some of that weight.

That's a Yokohama fender, for those who want to know.

It's a fender that you put between vessels when vessels go alongside.

But there is fishing nets, there are ropes, plastic cans, sachets from noodle packs, mooring lines, buoys, like everywhere, and what was particularly concerning with our trip was that we were there to go to the most remote places that you could go and recount penguin, chinstrap penguins, and we found all of this waste inside penguin colonies, more or less.

But also, looking at tourism, in 2011 there were about 20,000 tourists that entered Antarctica.

About 10 years later it's 55,000, and that doesn't include the 20,000 people that only go on vessels.

So it's expected that that tourism number is going to increase even more.

And then we have to remember that it's only four percent of the entire continent which is bearing ground.

So there's a lot of competition to actually go uh ashore in Antarctica.

And of course because of the weather, there's only a few places where you can where you can go onshore.

This, I think, we actually found on Elephant Island, and we spent the whole day to remove it so it's now part of a port facility in the Netherlands, because we didn't want to return it back to South America, because we were fearing it will go back on the ship again so it's in the port of [inaudible].

They were very happy to get it. But I think that thing contained like over 50 car tyres.

But of course, the waste is concerning, but one of the major concerns is of course krill fishing, but also toothfish but mainly krill.

So this is a krill fishing vessel, that's the kind of size they are.

There's about 11 boats that fish for krill in Antarctica.

This is the Dongwon owned vessel, Jan, the Sejong.

Four nations, it's Chile, Korea, China and Norway. Norway has by far the largest share of the catches.

And it's been an increase in catches, and quite interesting to see that we're back to the levels that caused so much concern that they created CCAMLR.

And we're probably about to exceed those, those levels.

And as you can see from this they're mostly only fishing in one area.

The area that's called 48, which is the same area as the Antarctic peninsula.

So it's an increase in catches, the expanding capacity, potentially but also by building new boats which, with a new technique that they call eco-harvesting.

Which means that, instead of pulling the trawler up of the water you keep the trawl in the water and you hold, like you pump it up.

So you have like a pump inside the end, of the cod end of the trawler and then you use water to pump it up on deck, and it means that you can have the trawl in about for a week to pump up.

So very, it's a very efficient way of fishing. Could be, not all technology is bad but of course it has impact.

But what we also seen is the concentration of catches.

So when you start looking at where they're catching, they're catching more and in, like, more specific areas.

And they're quite interesting this fleet because they follow each other.

Because Antarctica is so big and if they know that someone is heading off to regions, and if they know that these captains on those boats are good the others follow, so it's like a cat and mouse chase, where they all seem to, to follow each other around.

But how does this relate to penguins?

So Antarctica is definitely a place where you can look at land to understand changes in the oceans.

And penguins are like the canary in the coal mines but for the marine ecosystem in Antarctica.

They really tell us something about what goes on.

And many of the penguin populations are in decline and specifically those that live on the Antarctic continent.

So if you look at the ones like the King Penguins that we know from South Georgia, they are like slowly expanding south because their, kind of, range where they like to be is increasing, and also the Gentoo Penguins, so they call it 'Gentoofication' of Antarctica, but Chinstraps, Adélie Penguins and King Penguins are declining.

Penguins are also very vulnerable when they're on land, and they come on land for their, sort of, the period when they have chicks.

And then they all come on land, so it's even penguins that don't necessarily have chicks they're like, oh my pals are also being on land, so I'm gonna follow.

So this is a guy called Steve. He's a penguin scientist and counter.

This is from the Elephant Island ,and we were there to count Chinstraps because they haven't been counted for a very long time, at least not on Elephant Island, 50 years ago actually.

Do you see the, maybe you can't see it, do you see the leopard seal? [laugh]

Yeah. [makes dramatic sounds] There it is lurking in the sand.

Very conveniently placed because the penguins had to cross that little, they're too, they're very smart, those.

So we used some of the same principle of the work that we did in the Barents Sea.

So we launched this report which we called 'Licensed to Krill' where we then mapped the pattern of the fishing industry, and we overlay that with the proposed MPA from Argentina and, and Chile.

We also engaged very actively with Aker BioMarine which is the largest Norwegian company who's like built these new vessels.

Also very outspoken about sustainability, and how important that is for them.

So we thought that they, like they're the largest, they speak very highly of sustainability, so we therefore want to sort of engage with them.

So they knew that we were going to release this but it clearly shows that like there is a lot of fishing going on inside the areas that are proposed, to be predicted.

At the same time it was very simple. It was the question to the industry was, stay out of these areas for buyers of these products that could be everything from Holland and Barrett who sells krill tablets, to the feed industry who uses krill meal in their feeds, to not source from companies that are still fishing so much inside or fishing inside these areas.

We also know that we had a much tougher geopolitical situation in Antarctica than we faced in the Barents Sea.

Because of the complications around CCAMLR and nations has to agree by consensus, and also that we had very little leverage over the Chinese industry, in this case.

Again negotiations, some kind of co-production, I'm thinking, in terms of my...

We then landed in that ARK and so Aker BioMarine was very concerned that any agreement would only be for them, so that would be like unfair competition.

So they of course wanted to see everyone, so they used their power within ARK, which is the Association of Responsible Krill harvesting companies, to get ARK together to sign up to this agreement.

And they created what we call the Voluntary Restricted Zones.

It means that, you see the marked areas that are where penguin...so Gentoo are pink, Adélie is purple and Chinstraps are green, and they are not allowed to fish inside those areas during the time when penguins are on land.

Sadly we didn't manage to get Elephant Island into it, because it's a very important fishing ground, but we're working hard to try and get it in this year.

And the area where you see like an overlap here it's an area that they agreed to permanently close for all fishing.

And that's Hope Bay in the Antarctic Sound.

So now they do ,they do stay out and gladly.

So the agreement has been in place since 2017, it consists of an expert panel, which is scientists who are working in Antarctica, with different sort of penguin scientists, whale scientists, spatial planning scientists, but this is sort of outside a formal CCAMLR system.

But it has a review panel which consists of NGOs, mainly, but also representatives from ARK, the krill fishing industry.

It expires in 2024, or if the MPA gets adopted.

But there is actually already now a renewal process ongoing, because the industry is also keen to continue, which has been a bit of a shift, a bit of a change, which is sort of really nice.

There's a 99.5 compliance. One vessel managed last season to fish inside the area, panicked, were in there for, I don't know, 11 hours, sent this like 'we're so sorry' email and how they had informed the captain and 'we were not going to do this again' and but it shows something about sort of the honesty that they actually admit.

And it's been very important I think specifically working with industries which are hard to reach, like the Chinese, that you see that people are open and honest about, because mistakes happen, so yeah, it shouldn't be in any way punished.

And it's also been mentioned at least in in one scientific paper, and I think hopefully there will be more to come, that talks about, sort of at this voluntary, like voluntary initiative can sort of help to reduce negative impacts on penguins.

And there's been another paper also coming out quite recently that also looks at the importance of having, of not having fishing around penguins when they are on land.

So that's super nice and hopefully we'll get Elephant Island at some point, it would be great.

The Elephant Island Chinstrap penguins have been reduced since '71, to when we counted them in 2020.

They've been reduced with close to 70 percent, so it's a massive decline in Chinstrap Penguins on that island.

So why did I leave all this then? I have been to the Arctic, I've been to Antarctica.

And here I am, I'm like 43, a PhD student. But what brought me here, from the ship to a desk, is actually a scientific idea.

So the guy on the [left] Henrik over here is the person I've known, we're both Swedish and I've known him for a while, and I think this work that he's done has been truly influential in how I also see the world.

And that was the work they did around 'keystone actors'.

So what is a keystone actor? So this is how it's being defined by Henrik, and the way we work with Jan and others.

So they dominate global production revenues and volumes.

They control globally relevant segments of seafood production.

They connect ecosystems globally through their subsidiaries, and they influence global governance processes and institutions.

And when I read this I was like 'Eureka!'

I was like, I met all these industry people at UN meetings, at regulatory meetings.

I've come across their subsidiaries and their sort of net of production through the work I've done in the Barents Sea, and with the krill.

So this bit spoke very sort of straight to, sort of, my heart and I think truly sort of an unique opportunity to sort of do all this work, have this sort of scientific papers, and be able to then sort of reflect upon what does it mean for me, for my work, how can I sort of put what I do into context?

But it also means that through this work, and through the work that Jan is also part of, something that's called SeaBOS was created that I'm also part of, and work with.

So what is SeaBOS? It's the companies that dominate global seafood production basically.

And then some of you might have heard it from Jan.

It was launched in 2017 at the UN Oceans Conference.

It's a unique collaboration, I think it includes close to 30 scientists and these 10 companies.

You might not have heard of all of them, at least like some of them were sort of a bit new to me.

Cargill not so maybe, Thai Union not, but I don't know Dongwon, but I've never heard about Maruha Nichiro before I read this paper.

They have very, they're not visible in the Nordic Market at all, but when you realise that company turns around 2 million tons of seafood you start to understand that the size of these operations.

They also have over 500 different seafood species in their portfolios.

They operate in 96 countries and some of that is trading, some of that is fishing.

And they are about 18 to 20% of the traded value of seafood globally.

So they're truly, truly large in scale.

And for me that the work that we do in SeaBOS is like change work on steroids.

It's sort of the amplification of, like, relatively small but like, I felt big, project in the Barents Sea to suddenly like, whoa, we're talking about the world here and how that connects.

So it's been truly nice to be able to come back.

So SeaBOS is not part of my PhD. It's something I do on the side with Jan and others, but of course it's very influential to the work I do with my PhD, and how I think about seafood.

And of course my PhD is about transformations in the seafood industry, so that just sort of comes to the core of what I work on.

And so what I think that I have learned through this work.

I think it's, sort of, just realistic to a vision and a long-term perspective and to develop trust between the actors that you work with.

And I think if you can get the Russian fishing industry and Greenpeace to work together I think more of us could actually, we can find more unusual collaborations or usual collaborations to work.

I also think that it's like some of these challenges are very complex, and you need different kinds of skills and capacities to solve them.

And I think especially when you start looking into global systems of seafood trade, you can fish in the Barents Sea, ship it to the Netherlands, put in a cold storage in Germany, process it in Poland and then send it back to the UK.

Like there's so many, so much complexity in the system, and if you are going to impact it to become better, because I think fishing is great, and I think it's something that we should continue to do, I just think we can do it much better, but to understand that complexity we need different kinds of people.

I also think that we all learn. And for someone coming from Greenpeace to say that I've learned a lot from McDonald's might not be like something you hear often, but I think some of the conversations I had with them has been truly like amazing.

And I remember this like after one of these negotiations like everyone was a bit tired and people were waiting to get home and we were like oh let's go to the pub, and there we sat.

So the Head of Sustainability at the largest fishing company in Russia, the head of sustainability at McDonald's, and the three Greenpeace activists.

And we almost all of us missed our connections, like, for our flights because we had such a good time.

But that came after sort of building that trust.

But I also want to say, and even coming from Greenpeace, that science and data is at the core.

You have to understand what is the system that you're working with, to understand how you can interact with it, and what properties of it that you can change.

I also think that these unusual collaborations makes the outcomes more sustained, and it's been very nice to see how something that has been initiated has transferred into something that people all feel very proud of and maintained.

And I just received an email from one of the ARK industry members in CCAMLR who gave me like this full record of everything that went on in the negotiations, and what people said about what was going on, that is like amazing to see how something that was very uncomfortable for them has turned into something that they're very proud of and now sort of take ownership over.

I think it's also important when you do work on sustainability initiatives like from, from the NGO sector, and maybe I'm a bit different than others in the NGO, like in Greenpeace, but I think it's like to connect it to existing initiatives and policy processes.

Because changing the world doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do everything in new, in a new way, I think it's also about sort of tweaking and fixing the system that we have.

So if you can like sort of fast track conservation, which is partly what we tried to do in Antarctica.

If we can get the fishing industry to agree with us, why should countries still not agree with us, if they're the fishing industry that they're trying to protect.

But then also to remember very strongly, like, everyone in this is going to be outside their comfort zone [laughs] and I think Jan can also speak to that.

It's like, it's almost like the more uncomfortable you are the better placed you are to have these conversations, because if you're comfortable I don't think you're in the right place.

And it's that kind of uncomfortableness, if you can say that, it sort of creates a really nice dynamic, and I think it also creates a space for trying to find common solutions to the problems.

Even though, as I said in the beginning, I think it's also poor that someone starts to create that crisis that this collaboration needs to solve.

So that's, my talk is over, and I always want to end with this fantastic picture of Humpback Whale who thinks it's a tuna, because it's one of my favourite stories.

We almost hunted these whales to extinction because we needed them for industrial, for our for lamps, and other things.

We agreed as a global community, through the International Whaling Commission, it's the oldest environmental governance agreement we have, that came in force, to not hunt these whales.

It's taken a very, very long time, but like a few years ago we saw the first papers that could verify that the South Atlantic Humpback Whale population had recovered to pre-hunting numbers, which is such a good story.

And I think it sort of shows it has the essence of, sort of, we can collaborate, we can do good things, but it's also going to take some time.

And now there's so many Humpbacks in Antarctica that you almost do get a bit tired of them, because you see them everywhere and it's truly fantastic.

But I think it's good to remind ourselves that like in a world where everything is a bit sort of horrible, there's also good stories out there we should amplify them a bit more.

So I have some, maybe they will be shared later, but I think ARK, if you want to read about what ARK does, and SeaBOS.

I think Greenpeace is easy to find. And then of course this is great, a recent paper that came out from Henrik I think and Jan and myself are among it, that looks at sort of keystone actors and biosphere stewardship and goes through some of the work that we've done.

[Professor Jan Bebbington] I'm Jan, I'm helping to lead the conversation today and I've got, I'm just so delighted to be at Lancaster and to be the Director of the Pentland Centre.

It is for me a dream come true, 'cause I've been watching centres of this type over many, many years, and I'm really enthused by how they operate. So, I've spent the last three months in a state of over-excitement.

So, I'll try to calm down to be able to maybe make a presentation here. And the purpose of this presentation is to share with you what excites me about my work at the moment.

And I'm an academic accountant, so I've got an organisational science background and an interest, but also as a way of maybe highlighting points of connection for colleagues who have intersecting research interests, but also as a point of connection to the Pentland Centre.

This is an example of the type of work that happens in the Pentland Centre, which has got a whole systems focus, and trying to resolve real world problems in partnership with people affected by those problems, but also having a point of connection through to sustainability and business techniques. So I'm approaching this as an accountant, but also hopefully a whole systems accountant, not a narrow, just financial reporting accountant, but interested in accounting's functionality, which I'll speak about later on as well.

It also is, it would be a totally dishonest of me to say that this was my presentation, because there are many, many ecosystem of colleagues out there in the world who have informed my thoughts in this area, whose ideas I've shamelessly been 'stealing' and inspired by, and who I have an ongoing collaboration with.

And also all the colleagues that push me to do better in this space. And by this I mean, the reviewers that are quite often reluctant to publish the papers that I would like to publish that really pushed me to be much more crisp, and exact and more ambitious in my own work as well.

So I'd like to think that whole cohort, but particularly the Stockholm Resilience Centre colleagues who have really created a space for me to be able to work in this area, which I so appreciate and, and I'll tell you about some of their work 'cause its underpinning all of my work in this area.

So the kind of sort of road map for the conversation today is that I will start with an idea about sustainability science and then run through a series of steps that hopefully one builds off the other and takes you forward.

Now I'll say a wee bit about sustainability science. This is the mode of operation of the Pentland Centre and alongside other Centres within University of Lancaster as well and the Lancaster Environment Centre, Centre for Global Eco-Innovation would be really good examples of sustainability science inspired work.

The idea with this work is that you put a problem, whether it be climate change or forced labour or on antibiotics and seafood production at the centre of your concern and you from there, you build the knowledge that you need to resolve that question, and that might include knowledge from the natural sciences, from the physical sciences, from philosophy, from ethics, from leadership studies, from all sorts of areas, and so it's a very exciting place. Because you get to talk to lots of different people about how they perceive the problem. But it also feels a bit of a risky place 'cause it's quite different from our narrow and deep and particular expert silos of expertise.

And the place where I really uncovered sustainability science and started to be a bit familiar with how it worked, although I didn't know it had the name at that time, is during the 2000s and into the early 2010s. I was the Scottish vice chair for the Sustainable Development Commission, so this was a one day a week public appointment that I did alongside my academic work to support the Scottish Government in addressing sustainability challenges.

So we took the Climate Change Act through, through Parliament. The circular waste economy and zero waste ambitions through to you know, how do you actually renew housing stock, particularly old houses, in order to be warmer and those sorts of things. And the guide for me on that journey was Tim O'Riordan and who I didn't know at the time is one of the founding fathers of sustainability science.

So when I found out that there was a name for what he was teaching us how to do, I went off and then like a good academic, spent a lot of time reading about it and trying to understand it. Looking at how sustainability science centres operated. What do they do? What kind of research programmes that they had and that all came together in a paper that I published with a very good and longstanding co-writer of mine, Carlos Larrinaga, where we laid out how, as an accountant, you could do sustainability science and, be very careful what you wish for, I would say, because from that interaction it became apparent that there was some sustainability science that we could step in and be involved in and that's the the, the work and around the keystone actors and the seafood.

So to get us to that point, basically I think there's something for everyone in this talk. An hour is a long time to be on zoom, so you've got three moments where you can relax. So if you are an earth system scientist, that's really on top of keystone patterns in the Anthropocene, you can relax when we're talking about that because you're on the board, you know what that's about. And for those of you who are accountants when I talk about the nature of accounting, as both a technical and a social practice, you can have a wee rest because you know about that. And then finally, for those of you who look at corporate sustainability initiatives and how they operate and how they're constructed, you can have a relax when we talk about that.

But what I really like about my work at the moment is that I have to make my way around all the three elements of that clover leaf because they come together in an applied practice based initiative called Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship. So SeaBOS for short, and I will say quite a bit about SeaBOS at various stages in this process.

To kick us off, I'm gonna start with the Anthropocene and this is really the biggest picture of all. Is the idea that the Earth has passed through different stages in its life that those stages are characterised by a combination of chemical and biological and geological bringing together of assemblages and that those assemblages drive the nature of the functioning of the Earth system.

So the glacials, the interglacials, all of these elements that are sort of in the background of our minds as we understand the world in which we live, sit behind this proposition, which is now quite widely accepted that we've moved from the Holocene into the Anthropocene. So the Holocene has been characterised as a place where most of us as modern humans have lived. It's a nice cosy place, so the temperature's been quite nice, there haven't been any meteor strikes of a large sort. There haven't been, you know, huge movements of materials through volcanoes, and so what we've been able to do is flourish and the life that we've created for ourselves, which is pretty carbon intensive and quite resource intensive.

In this, the safe operating space for humanity. Of course, the Earth is always dynamic, so there's no reason why we might imagine we would be in the Holocene forever. And also there's no reason to imagine we wouldn't move into another sort of state, which itself will have different characteristics associated with it. But the rate and pace of change between these different epochs is usually, well, it can be quite quick, but it's usually sort of quite slow to a certain extent, and so species come and go, the temperature increases and decreases as carbon dioxide intensities change.

And the idea with the Anthropocene is that we've moved outside of that relatively slow moving from a human perspective, slow moving steady state into something else. And in the bottom corner of the slide is one way of articulating that changing world, and so this is the Planetary Boundaries work which came out, sort of 2009 or so. Where a group of scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Centre try to sort of say, well, OK, if we know what the safe space is, how far beyond that are we?

And you can see here on climate changes is outside of the orange, which is a safe place. Safe limits. Around climate change, there's you know the whole IPCC process. There's you know, country processes, there's organisational processes like declaring a climate emergency and what that means for operations which the University of Lancaster is part of, of that movement as well.

And so if you like what you're looking at then, is in each one of these Planetary Boundaries where we've exceeded them, we're trying to understand how we pull them back in. Biodiversity loss is, is hugely accelerated, and so if you like the whole worry about natural capital and biodiversity and ecosystem services sit in that one.

And while this was a sort of a global scientific investigation and articulation of the problem areas, organisational studies have also noticed this and, and drawn on this framing to understand what organisations might do, and one of the papers I find very inspiring in this area was by the previous Pentland Director, Gail Whiteman, and trying to understand how do we take this science framing and bring it to play into an organisational context.

Some of those would be an organisation signing up to the Sustainable Development Goals, which is a proxy if you like for some of these elements in the, the Planetary Boundaries framework, other ways might be to sign up to targets like 1 degree C through the science based target initiatives, etc. So there is a connection already between the global view of how the world looks and what we might be interested in as organisational scientists.

And the proposition with the Anthropocene is not just that it's changing in a more dynamic and fast way, and might knock us out of a comfortable space. But the proposition is that human action is a significant source of that change, so the increased loss of biodiversity is driven by land use change, and by exploitation of natural resources that will drive some species to extinction. And indeed, you know, we've done that over our whole modern human lifetime.

Likewise, and some of these pictures demonstrate some of the other aspects in the Anthropocene, if you look at the top right, we've moved tons of material around the world and we've also created novel forms of material that don't have any analogy in the natural world. Concrete being one of them, for example, plastics being another, nuclear material being another, and what we've done with that is that we've ended up changing the ecosystem because of those activities.

Likewise, in the bottom left hand corner you can see, a human, you know, disastrous, but also an economic and environmental problematic situation where we've created pollution effects, and the greenhouse gas emissions would be the most you know, common and topical example, which is now is on everyone's radar, if you like, you know from a few years back.

When as an organisational scientist, you're looking at these big sort of Earth system moves, and you're thinking right well what can I do as a result of that, one of the key concepts is the idea of telecoupling. Of how things that happen in one part of the world can have an impact on the other part of the world.

And so I've got a slide that I really like, and I'm not sure it's actually about telecoupling, but it's a nice slide for, for introducing how to think about telecoupling. So this is a pre-pandemic map of world air travel networks and how big the hubs are and how much is moving around.

So this is if you like a snapshot of where there are certain nodes across a global network, and where those nodes connect to other elements and in the on the planet's surface. It's also tells you something about some of the driving effects, and I'm taking the COVID-19 where we watched this in real time about how movement of people and materials, particularly people in the COVID context around the world, transmits effects across time and space.

Again, many ways of looking at this so this is transport hubs. This could also be stock exchanges, and so if you like stock exchanges where companies are listed are telecoupled nodes that drive material and all sorts of other spaces as well and across into other ecosystems.

Likewise, there are natural systems of this sort, so choices about irrigation within India, for example, will have an effect on rainfall elsewhere in the world, and particularly across in South America. And so what I'm interested in, and where I think organisational studies comes into play, is the idea that organisations are part of these connections that drive particular activities in distant places, from maybe headquarters to subsidiary, but also that drive impacts across the whole system, and these are complex and dynamic systems that operate in this way, of which there's a huge literature and the whole field of studies looking at the nature of these dynamic and complex systems.

So if I try to draw those things together and move forward towards accounting a little closely. What will, I would argue, and what we argue in the work that I'm involved in, is that in the Anthropocene people and nature are dynamically intertwined. Now in a way that's actually very immediate and drives these earth system processes.

Some parts of the literature that looks at the Anthropocene goes, 'oh my goodness', you know people are, you know the nature-culture distinction that we made during the Enlightenment from a Western perspective is now collapsing in on itself, and I have some sympathy with that, because social sciences often in the past, viewed the environmental conditions under which people live as a, as a passive backdrop that sort of rolls along in the back of the play.

But what people did were the most interesting things, whereas now those two things are very firmly intertwined. And you can observe how intertwined they are from the data. But I also yeah, I to me they were never particularly separated and maybe I didn't go through a decent Scottish enlightenment.

But you know, the Indigenous People of Aotearoa in New Zealand where I come from never thought they were separate, and so I realised that I sort of built up, brought up and infused with the sense that these two things are always intertwined. I think what's different now is there's more recognition of that intertwining, but also the consequences of that.

Take it as a starting point then. We start to head towards organisations and accounting a little more specifically in the work that I do. In terms of globalisation and particularly during the 1950s, that great acceleration where materials and energy flows and the flow of people and the flow of raw resources started to move upwards enormously, but also be spread across the globe.

So those telecommunication channels, if you like, were opening up and becoming used more often. The key element behind that, there's all sorts of things like trade markets etc, but for us transnational companies are an absolutely essential feature of that, and a characteristic of the Anthropocene.

So, transnational corporations are really interesting entities because they're large but also they touch down in many different places and even though subsidiaries might have their own independence they are driven at least in part by head office policies and practices and desires. And then if those transnational companies are listed on stock exchanges, there's a further link back to a rationality of relatively short term profit maximisation behaviour, which is driven by Stock Exchange listing.

If you're not listed, you've got a bit more room to manoeuvre in that that context. So moving from the Anthropocene to globalisation to transnationals, then you say, well, human behaviour taken together is often mediated by organisations and hence organisations mediate our human behaviour across to global environmental change. In this respect, whilst I try to walk a lot more and take public transport etc, most of my choices about how to travel around, around well, particularly around the world which we don't do anymore, but we might do again, but to maybe travel around the UK are mediated by organisations, whether
they be bus companies, car companies, if you own a car, or train, train companies and how we organise the train system.

So organisations provide an array of choices to us that some of it rests with me and I can make some choices, but many of my choices are constrained and shaped by organisational activities and / or organisations and I make that choice together about what kind of impact there's going to be.

So whilst we are, you know, maybe focusing on the climate emergency and trying to address that, I absolutely agree there things that individuals can do that I can do as a human being and in the system, at the same time organisations shape and condition a lot of those choices, and they themselves are shaped and conditioned by the governance frameworks that they rest within, which ultimately rests with nation states and obviously UN processes are above that.

Taking the idea of telecoupling, organisations are also nodes for telecoupled systems, and so they're there if you like holding hands with distant parts of the world and conveying effects through them. And this will come really important when I come on to the case study I want to talk about, because we are seeing in that some large and quite crucial organisations which we're going to call keystones as being really influential in the nature of the outcome of the system because they're very strongly coupled together and are really important nodes of influence. And in accounting is a really amazing practice. Mostly we talk about accounting as controlling organisations and providing information and context within which an organisation can make claims and execute them.

So you have budgeting, strategic planning, all of those kind of activities. Alongside it accounting also provides information into markets to discharge accountability and that might be financial markets, but it might also be say through product labelling and consumer markets, or through reports about how they interact with their local environment through to communities. So accounting for me is a really amazing technology that connects at a distance, that provides control at a distance, but also provides a source of accountability.

And I really, I'm not entirely convinced how this next slide fits into the flow of the talk, but it's a series of ideas that I've been really trying to work with and make better sense of, and it's created by Miller and Power who are two very influential accounting scholars, and they if you like, have been really important in articulating what kind of social practice accounting is. And they split accounting into four different roles.

So the first role is that accounting provides a space where people can come together and decide what, you know, a bunch of activities that they might do. Of course this is the essence of markets in terms of creating these calculative spaces, 'cause as accountants we do tend to you eventually end up down in the numbers where we can make some common fields of action. But these calculations, calculative spaces could be product costing, it could be is a division, profitable, etc, so creating these spaces where we can make some, some way of knowing about what's happening and have a common field in which we might create action
is quite important.

Back then comes into this mediating role, and I think accounting as a mediating instrument is massively interesting because it accounting enables that interaction and communication about what work might be needed and how action might be supported. So there's common language developed and around rules for measurement. But how do you make a product cost? What kind of ways do you put costing together? What would be an appropriate measure of profit of a division, for example, and what work would happen because of knowing if a division is profitable or not.

The next layer then is that once you have agreed on the thing you're going to calculate for, when you have agreed on how to do that, you've now got a basis for evaluation across multiple dimensions, which Miller and Power characterise as adjudicating, and then finally you get to there for a context where some sort of control can be achieved.

And these four steps if you like, underlie a great deal of driving of organisational practice. 'Cause organisations are not solely driven by accounting, but the way that they are measured as to whether or not they're profitable, if they're successful, if they are efficient, if they're providing value for money, has this accounting technology somewhere there in the background, creating all of these effects.

A really good example of this is the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures which is trying to do that mediating adjudication and eventually subject, subjectivisation process in order to make this crossover between climate risk and organisational risk. And 30 years ago, and Ken and I were talking about this at the outset of the talk, 30 years ago a group of scholars came together and said, well, the environment comes into here somewhere and at the moment the environment is outside accounting.

But there are accounting tools and techniques that allow us to start lacing environmental understandings of organisational practice through these, these four processes. Incompletely and imperfectly, but they're underlying these, these points of connections. And I was particularly fortunate to be around at the start of that field, and to have been you know immensely supported by Rob Gray who opened the field, but then also to have had some really amazing fellow travellers along the way, including Jeffrey Unerman, who used to be employed here at Lancaster before he passed away.

So to try to hook these conceptual pieces together. So if we are living in the Anthropocene, and that's fairly well established, although still open to scientific scrutiny and disagreement, which is appropriate, and if we have accounting as this regime, and this this complex force that creates certain effects.

And if, as an accountant I take sustainability science seriously, then you end up coming into the project that I now like to describe to you for the remaining half of the lecture.

And so some other key concepts to add to this is looking at sociologic...socio-ecological systems and complex adaptive systems, and we're going to look at the seafood system which has this characteristic as many systems of any interest do have. I'm interested in leverage points for behaviour change, and if you like, I'll come on to sort of the underlying mode sitting behind keystone actors, which will sort of provide some of that that insight.

And in particular, keystone actors as a mode of engagement, and I want to say a bit more about this because this is that the heart of the case study that I'm working on with SRC at the moment and which you know without putting too fine a point on it is the most exciting thing I've ever got to do in my academic career and keeps me very enthused as well as awake at night worrying about it sometimes, as you can imagine.

So 'keystone species' is a technical description of species whose presence and role have a disproportionate effect on the shape of an ecosystem. A very good example would be what happened to Yellowstone Park when wolves were reintroduced, it had an effect on deer populations which affected tree growth etc, etc.

There's been a longstanding stream of work that came before people alighted on this idea that there is a keystone species and a great deal of scientific work across lots of different ecosystems to realise that keystone species are these shaping species. Sometimes they are quite unusual things, but they're really important. So, what happened, particularly in conversation with with folk at the Stockholm Resilience Centre is that there was a thought, a spark, an absolute moment of inspiration of saying, well, are there keystone actors in the global corporate landscape?

So, is there something like keystone species in our economies who collectively are large enough and integrated enough? Picking up on that telecoupling idea to shape the system in which they operate.

And this is the case study of what we believe is some seafood keystone actors that would allow us to actually work that out in real time. And so it's so it's an open hypothesis, but one that we are busily gathering data on, that if corporate actors who are in these spaces come together and agree a series of actions and then undertake those actions, then we might end up transforming the shape and the nature of the, the industry in which they operate. And that seed of an idea has been picked up in other places as well.

Looking at keystone actors in corporate settings as well as keystone actors in other areas as well. So I'm just going to use a few examples here. The first one I'm going to spend a lot of time on, so I won't say anything about this now. But there's also a more recent paper that looks at the global network of ports that support high sea fishing efforts, and so you've got a relatively small number of harbours that support 84% in this case of, of the fishing effort, and this isn't a surprise to us.

This is the whole 80-20 rule, isn't it, that you know, that these two things sort of drive together, but what this would suggest that if ports are important areas in which you might be able to exercise control, which is one of those accounting functions that we're looking for, then you don't have to do it for all of the harbours and ports, you can look at some and they will if they have protections about landing illegal fish or making sure that people that are joining boats are not going into forced labour, then they would have a disproportionate effect on the outcomes that you're seeking to achieve.

Likewise, Robert, who I think is on the call somewhere and so big shout out to him, has looked at genetic resources from the ocean, and particularly marine linked patents, and one company has registered 47% of all those patents, so this raises questions about your enclosure of the Commons, and in this case the genetic Commons and fairness and access to these resources.

But it also tells you that there is a single company, and along with one or two others, who actually are the people who are the potential guardians of that genetic resources material and, and the sequencing of it. The Ocean 100 is another final example and I haven't put the full references to all these because they're quite big author sets, but if you haven't picked up on these and you want to know about any of them, you know just drop me an email and happy to pass the papers onto you.

So this is looking at the largest 100 ocean industry companies across a range of sectors who, if you like collectively are going to be in the ocean space, and looking at you know how big they are, where do they operate, what kind of work do they do, what kind of environmental accounting, corporate social responsibility predispositions do they have?

And the reason for thinking about these is the, the idea which I think is reasonably fraught, but is a is a really important idea to open up is to ask the question of whether or not corporates could become stewards of the biosphere.

Of course, there is a sense in which that a lot of the conversation on this usually falls into two categories, with people saying, oh, let's leave the companies out of this, 'cause they've done enough harm, through to people saying yeah, for sure you know pass over the Commons to companies and markets and everything will be fine.

Of course the messy middle is where the real questions lie, and so that's again it's an open question about whether or not corporations could become biosphere stewards.

My very favourite paper on this, which is in the, the references at the back of this set of slides, looks at a whole series of industries and you might be leaning into your computer at the moment to be able to see it, and I will as well. So you've got agriculture and forestry and seafood, agrichemicals, etc. Then you've got the fossil fuels and the mining companies. This is a keystone analysis across all of these sectors, trying to identify whether or not a small number of firms have the largest share of the, the activities within that sector, and so, for example, you know 10 company coffee companies have 40%, so that's you know, I don't know if that's good or bad, so this is an interesting point.

You have to figure out how concentrated is usually concentrated, but you can see there's more concentration, say in the platinum side of things, which is in your top right hand bit of it with five companies mobilising 91% of those resources. And so what you've got here is basically 200 companies. Transnationals. Some of them owned privately, some of them owned publicly. Some of them owned with a mix, who mobilise via their global practices all of these materials.

And this is also the essence of what we have with the SeaBOS set of companies in terms of in this diagram the, the SeaBOS companies are often the seafood sector. So this, if you like, is now taking this wee blue bit of the map here and looking at it in more detail. And the way to describe this then. This is a sustainability science and action research project, looking at seafood businesses and to see whether or not they might be able to become ocean stewards, and the seafood businesses have been selected through a keystone process of analysis.

And the website there is to SeaBOS itself which is an industry initiative, so they have their own independent life. Relatively recently got their own independent life, but the whole thing is a partnership between a group of scientists and a group of businesses to try to see what we might be able to do jointly in this space.

The three components of the seafood businesses here, are the catching of the fish, which is, you know, something that we usually think of when we think of seafood, down the bottom aquaculture settings of growing of fish in all sorts of places. You know, salmon within UK waters would be a very large proportion of activity of that sort that you would have seen.

And then up in the top right hand corner is the feeds and oils business. So SeaBOS brings together these three elements of the industry because of course they are all interconnected, so the kind of fish that we might eat particularly if they have been freshly caught, and we're eating at a restaurant, if you like, comes from one part of the mix. But if we're eating salmon, then it's come from aquaculture, but it's got wild capture sources gone through a feeds company with other materials to come to our tables as a farmed fish.

So these three things are intimately interconnected.

Now one of my SRC colleagues, Jean-Baptiste (Jouffray), started to look then at what does the seafood industry look like? And remember that we had this idea, he had this idea and his colleagues had this idea that the size of the company might matter in this context, and they might also have a keystone pattern. And so what you've got here is your revenues and profits of these firms, and you see that there are some very very large companies in this mix. And then it falls off.

So this is, you know, quite a big data set, but the largest 13 have a have a you know disproportionate impact because they are the largest, they are interconnected, a lot of them are vertically integrated and they operate all over the globe. So looking at this group, what the project did, and I joined it after this stage and it was very exciting to join it, is that you can characterise these players from an economic perspective, but you can also characterise them ecologically as well.

So starting with the corporate characteristics. This is the corporate characteristics in a summary form. The blue splodges is the number of companies that these corporations operate within and the pinky coloured circles are the number of subsidiaries that they have had. And these are the largest 13.

There's a bit of a concentration in Norway, as you can see, one Spanish, one across in the US, a couple in Thailand, one number 9 in China, one in South Korea and then another wee cohort in Japan. And this is where you know the different size of the circle, depends how you wish to organise your corporate activities as to how many countries you want to operate in given what you're doing, but also how many subsidiaries you want to structure and around them.

So some of these companies are listed on Stock Exchange, some of them are subsidiaries of larger companies again and then some of them are family owned, others have quite large family owned characteristics within them.

Particular for my accounting colleagues and, and sort of business study colleagues on the talk, this this is a data set that you would never imagine putting together from a normal science accounting perspective because it's not the same country of incorporation.

It's, it might even if you weren't ecologically minded, they might even look like quite separate industries in terms of wild capture to feeds to aquaculture. Likewise, they're not all listed, so they're not all going to have readily available data about them from a corporate characteristics perspective and databases.

But this is a keystone sample, so it does look very different and I think one of the innovations of this work and the, the ongoing keystone work, particularly for accounting and organisational studies, is to see different cohorts come together that have a relationship with an environmental problem or a social problem that you're seeking to address, and seeing how those relationships play out.

So this is a snapshot of thei,r their corporate characteristics. Taking their ecological characteristics, and these numbers are estimates, and again I'll explain the, the circles and then I'll explain a bit about the process and how to read this this picture. The grey circles, is the stock volume, so the larger the grey circle, the bigger of the amount of materials and volume of materials are funnelled through this.

The green colour then is the value, so there's some things that are like bluefin tuna, which is in the, the sort of overlaid on the Middle Eastern part, the North Africa part of the the map here, that's quite a small volume, but they're very valuable species, so it's got a high stock stock value, not stock market, but stock as in fishing stock, value.

And the blue is wild capture, the the yellow is, is some of the aquaculture materials, not all of the fish for all of these companies, but some of the big ones.

And then the, the pinky purpley colour is the feeds.

How to read this then? If we start off at Alaska, so 4 of the 13 keystone actors capture 40% of the volume of that fishery, so that's quite a an interesting percentage. You know what those four companies, if they changed their behaviour then that would have a cascade effect on the rest.

Likewise, one company has 23% of the capture of the Northeast Atlantic Pelagics. In other areas, there isn't the concentration around this biological measure, so 4 of the 13 companies have 6% of the volume of the whiteleg shrimp market, so there's probably no leverage effect or possibility to change
things in there.

This is quite a, it's an interesting map 'cause it recasts our understanding of these companies which we had in the preceding map, so recasts them, but recasts it in a species and ecological picture. And this is indeed an early presentation of this material that I saw in a workshop that I managed to get invited to, and quite honestly, even now it happens to me, my hair stood on end because as an accountant I'm interested in organisations I can tell you who's big.

My theories tell me that big firms might be politically exposed and they might do particular things. I know that firms and dirty industries are tend to do more things in these kind of areas, but I don't know what their ecological impact is, I have no idea because I'm not an ecologist.

But here is the picture that helps me see that and helps join my accounting knowledge across to an ecological basis. It's also worth saying because it links through to what happened next is how did this information, how was this information gathered?

These estimates are gathered from publicly available data sources, and for my understanding of the story of, of putting this material together, the researcher who did it every now and then would sort of talk to some people in the companies and so much easier if you told me what you landed and they said no thank you, please go away. As you can imagine.

But then kind of like this back and forth and the starting of the conversations, would lead to a question like, well, why do you want that information and why is it interesting to you as a researcher? And so through this process of articulating this you know this map, but also a great deal of additional work, it got that the researchers ended up in conversation with some of these companies that underlie this process.

So what we move is from a keystone actor, which gives you a snapshot at a particular point in time of some characteristics, moved into a keystone dialogue. And, if you want me to say more about how that happens, I will probably ask somebody on the call to say more about that, but basically what happens is happened in this process, is that science to business conversations took place.

And that those one to one conversations were facilitated and enabled and took a long time as well to go back and forth to build relationships of trust and relationships of understanding what the researchers were trying to do and intersecting that with the concerns of the companies.

Thoseback and forths and bilaterals turned into an opening dialogue with eight of the ten of these companies where there was an initial dialogue with science sharing what it was worried about with regard to seafood in the in the future and corporate insights about what they were worried about.

And through that a co-design process has come together whereby these companies work alongside science to be able to fulfill a series of commitments that were made at that first meeting. So there was a series of commitments which is on the website of, of this initiative and progressively over time, the these companies are seeking to make those commitments come real, but also are working with science to be able to find a way to do that.

So if I were to characterise it for some organisational science people, this is a CEO to CEO leadership cohort, so the critical thing is that once a year these CEOs get together and make, you know review progress and make future decisions. Once a year, their operational staff on a six months offset basis get together and check in with the scientists and make sure that they've got support and the materials and, and their progress towards achieving what was set out, the you know the previous six months.

The companies have come together as SeaBOS, an official entity, and they pay into that in order to have support to do that. The science is all externally funded by philanthropic trusts. So as researchers, we don't we don't have money from these companies to do the work we do, and that helps keep you know some, some you know we're not to be reliant on funding, introduces more independence, etc.

And what's interesting about this cohort to me as well, is that there's a really super paper by Gond, Kang and Moon that looks at different versions of capitalism and how organisations behave quite differently in different places, and they pull out, you know, Japanese companies as looking quite interesting and different, we've got 3 of these in here, and then also like an Anglo-American kind of mode of operating is also quite different, and then a Scandinavian mode of thinking about capitalism and how companies operate is quite different.

So there's a, there's a bit of an aside there, there's there's a wee bit of a snapshot of a natural laboratory here about how these different organisations from different parts of the world with different underlying models of capitalism, may be actually interacting in this process quite differently. In terms of what actually happens and what keeps us all nice and busy, is that there'll be a commitment and I work particularly in the area of forced labour.

So there's a task force on trying to eradicate forced labour from these companies' own operations, but also from their supply chains as well. So I've done some briefings on, you know the nature of human rights and business, how does that translate through? How do you get from the international protocols through to organisational commitments?

Done some surveys of best practice of how people do that well and, and who would be good exemplars of that. Looking at modern slavery reporting and what does that entail and how would could that be a useful driver towards organisational change? From time to time we survey SeaBOS on a sort of like an arm's length of independent basis and present back to them what the, what they as a cohort might be doing in terms of who has what kind of policies, etc.

We make very, very sure that we don't reach any antitrust requirements in those kind of processes, we codesign these dialogues together to help these companies learn from each other. We will work with them to try to develop tools and approaches that might be effective.

So in any one year, I know that I'll be very busy this time in May 'cause we're heading towards an operational meeting, and then busy in around October when the CEO meetings are on, but actually I'm not always entirely sure what we will be doing, except that it'll be interesting, and it will evolve and emerge out of the science-business partnership.

As, as a part of the science cohort, we have desires and hopes that these firms will go far, but at the end of the day, it is their responsibility to go far or not.

There is an idea though, if you want to go fast, you go alone, and if you want to go further, you go together, and I guess we're in that latter bit of it, thinking that these guys will be able to learn from each other but also challenge and help each other be held accountable for the commitments that their original
CEOs made in about 2006 or so.

And this is just a snapshot of, of the website of the various task forces and kind of issues that that we're dealing with. So to make sure there's no illegal IUU fishing products and raw materials, that there's no forced labour in SeaBOS member activities and their supply chains, so those of you who work in that area know how difficult that is, creating improved traceability, which of course involves technology as well as agreeing key data elements that can be passed from one firm to another so you can trace materials across those, those supply chains through this telecoupled nodes, through to working with governments to improve regulations and, and this is where if you like the voice of this team of, of companies, if their CEOs get together and say if you regulate we will be fine and we will make it work, is actually a really powerful and important voice to have in there.

Across on the other side they have made commitments around reporting which of course we're, we're tracking and interested in how that evolves over time, through to ocean plastics, through to climate resilience.

So these are the current task forces, there will be, these will open out as other issues come into play, but also in these are all moving at quite different speeds as well. So I want to sort of start drawing this to a close by giving you a sense of some of the sample of the time bound goals.

So these are off the SeaBOS website, so I'm not showing you anything that the world can't see if it chooses to look, and if you like my colleagues who are working in the SeaBOS firms at the operational level are very busy trying to achieve these and other things as well, so some of it's about getting strategies together for issues that are quite early on in their their consideration, endangered species and the use of antibiotics.

Other ones are more longstanding issues that we've been working at for quite some time on IUU fishing and forced, bonded and child labour and operations, and across supply chains, through to getting a really clear sense of what emissions reduction trajectories the companies are on and how they're doing it.

So what it brings me to is, and this if you like, I mean this, this project is going to keep going for the rest of my working life and probably a bit more of that as well. Along the bottom is the external funders of the work, so I want to make sure that you notice that these people have been immensely supportive and allowed this work to happen, so some of the work in this area is the science for SeaBOS, so might be you know where would action need to be taken for endangered species.

So where are they endangered species in the world? What kind of actions would you take? How do ports affect the landscape of addressing forced labour, IUU etc? Where are those risks? What is the best practice reporting? So these
are if you like are all quite specific questions.

There are also things on which you know papers are under development and also published in these kind of areas. But alongside that, and at least in part because of this co-designed and this joint working approach, we're also doing trying to do the science of SeaBOS.

So you remember from the outset that the hypothesis was that if these organisations changed, if these keystone actors moved, then there will be cascading effects that would shift the whole industry.

That is, that's an open question. One of the things that we're about to head off on is looking at how their reporting transformed over the last six years. So really fairly decent period of time which we can look at two snapshots.

Myself and a colleague Madlen (Sobkowiak), who may be on this call who's doing the heavy lifting on that, is doing a systematic literature review about how would you evaluate a corporate sustainability initiative using the best insight that we can find in the business and management studies as to how you might do that and trying to construct an evaluation framework from that.

But there's also like tons of really interesting questions in here, so this cascade and this transformation or effect. What is the time scale for that?

It's definitely not three years, it had better not be 25, but actually do these issues that they're addressing, do they run on different kinds of time scales? How does you know innovation and changes in procurement policy? How quickly does that happen?

How does it long does it take for that to have an effect on the supply chain? How many interactions would a CEO need to have with another CEO to build trust and what kind of trust would be generated from that process? An empirical question to which I don't know the answer.

What kind of leadership did the CEOs and the operational people in this initiative demonstrate? We have been trying to collect some data from that and might have some insights to bring to them. Is there anyone shadowing this group?

So my secret desire and again with that model of change in mind is that we might find out that there's four or five companies who are not part of SeaBOS but who watched their annual meetings and see what their time bound goals are and say, well, let's adopt them, do the same thing. So almost like shadow SeaBOS members of some sort.

The final thing we're then trying to understand is that what are we doing together as natural scientists and organisational scientists? And we're certainly having a grand time together. I am finding out so much more about seafood than I ever imagined I could find out, and my natural
science colleagues are more informed about accounting than they ever wish to be, or realised they could be.

But there is something about researching our own practice here as well. About you know, how do you start to understand each other, and coming back to the paper on accounting and accountability in the Anthropocene, I really love that paper of all the papers I've written recently, because for us the Anthropocene was the idea that we both knew about, both the natural scientists and the social scientists, and we assembled around that to tease out well what does that mean to us in the context of SeaBOS and what does it mean to how we think about the work that we might do, and so trying to understand how that knowledge formulation process comes together is also part of the work.

It's also immensely reassuring to be working in that area when you wanting when I'm wanting to foster and support the work of the Pentland Centre. Which if you like is another place where we're trying to think about how business itself, business researchers but also scientific research might come together.

I want to leave you with one of my favourite pictures which I don't know, some of you would have seen this, but this tells me that corporate change is possible.

'Cause I'm, I'm not very good at being a cynic, even though sometimes I do feel dismayed. So I would like to say corporate change is possible, so this is an advert from the past from Humble which became eventually Esso. They used to advertise at each day they supply enough energy to melt 7 tons of glacier.

I you know it's a it's a fantastic ad, if you tried to run this now I don't know what people would think of it, but it certainly wouldn't be good. So I think that there is a, you know a long process. It will be a multi- generational process to sort out some of the problems that we have created collectively through human agency, organisational behaviour and maybe poor governance processes, to deal with these absolutely critical areas of work

[mobile phone rings]

So I've kept this on in case Desna had to ring me and say nobody can see you anymore, do something different, but there you have it.

OK, so here are some selected references, but I will also happy to pass people any papers that they might find interesting in this set.

And at that stage I am going to finish this and stop sharing so this should re resurrect us back to where we were.

Have I done the successful last bit?

[Desna Mackenzie]: Yeah, fantastic. Thanks ever so much Jan.