Richard Howitt
speaker
582 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 29 Jul
Richard Howitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Now you've referred already to John Ruggie and you and I both had again the privilege of working with him and it was such an exciting moment I think to be involved in all of that but you were reflecting back on it at a meeting where you spoke in Geneva at the UN conference
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uh persistent human rights forum at the end of last year the the meeting was called the death of human rights which proves that you know how to build an audience i'm sure you're not saying human rights are going to die um but you did say that persistent human rights had at least partially failed by becoming the new orthodoxy can you just elaborate on what you meant and what you mean by that
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let's move on to the book then um it is interesting that the first big project that you've had or one of the first big projects you've had since stepping down is on sustainability not on business and human rights i think that that's that rather proves the argument that you just just put the the book is called remaking sustainability and in it you make the case that
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that sustainability advocates have got things wrong some of the time. So explain to me how we've got it wrong. And I do define myself as a sustainability person as well as a human rights person.
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many of the people in that pushback feel that they are pushing back against the orthodoxy and the establishment. And yet we all feel like we're still the activists on the outside. So it's a strange juxtaposition, I think, yeah. I might ask you how the pushback's going to get worse. I'm sure everyone's really happy to hear that. But what you just said there,
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sounded almost like a recipe for green hushing, but actually in the book, you're very critical of green hushing. So just elaborate on that for me, would you? Yeah, green hushing is a form of green washing, in my opinion, right? It's just by not saying anything, by keeping quiet,
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And we recently had our podcast on the German Supply Chain Act, so people who are interested in finding more about that, please do look on the website and listen back to that. In the reporting sphere...
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which I plead guilty, I've been part of for many years. Metrics are key. And you argue in the book that we should get away from siloed metrics. I think you've made the case about the silos already. You say there are too many trees to see the wood. But you then say...
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that we should choose system metrics, and you've referred to a systemic approach already. How do you define the difference between the two, and how far are the existing attempts, both at the European and the global level, to get the metrics right, hitting the mark, and how far do they need to change?
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Yeah, I think it's easy to say we want system change and system leadership, and you make a very strong argument in the book about the need for system leadership. But in my experience, too many people then just equate that with laws. And as you've already argued earlier in this conversation, that can only be part of how we change behaviours and change whole systems.
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You know, reporting due diligence are important levers, but tariffs and trade are also very, I would say, even more important and consequential in some ways. I agree with you about CBAM. What I'm seeing, though, around the world is countries inventing their own CBAMs, often less strict, but saying they're equivalent and trying to use that to avoid being subject to the European restrictions. So let's see how that plays out in the next years.
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When you talked about the pushback getting worse before it gets better, which I'm actually not going to ask you about, you were really confident in saying sustainability will come back. There's no doubt about that, you said. No, there's no doubt. Why are you so sure about that? Because when you look deeply into the way that global finance is working, the way that technology is working, the way that trade is going to work...
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We haven't listened to people. We haven't listened to communities. And again, insurance is one of our forthcoming themes on the podcast. So we'll look at that in more detail. Last question, John.
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You've been talking about how business and human rights, sustainability looks, but let's just say business and human rights for those people and audiences specialising in that in the mid 2020s looks like and how that's changed. Can you get your visionary glasses on
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and add on 10 or 15 years. And I guess you would say the work programme of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights is very structural and it's saying many interesting and important things, but I guess you would say it's a bit siloed. So if you look beyond that, add on 10 or 15 years and what are business and human rights going to look like?
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In this podcast, we've heard that authenticity is everything, a lesson that you learned from the early days of The Body Shop. You described how human rights was being taken forward by business, not for ideological reasons, but because of experience, and that that was the key player.
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You said that economic, social and cultural rights have made the smallest progress over the last 15 years. You talked about trust mattering and that when you get different parties in conflict together, there is always some common ground to be found. And you talked about John Ruggie and the guiding principles being entrepreneurial, not being an orthodoxy.
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We then talked about the book, Remaking Sustainability. You talked about the need to really move ahead on the just transition agenda, which you said was only just starting. You said sustainability must be operational rather than performative. No one show was crucial to it.
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On metrics, you talked about nexus metrics that link the silos. Perhaps we'll come back to that and the work going on in the World Economic Forum in a future podcast. You talked about trade and trade incentives being absolutely crucial, and that's
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We're at a moment of sea change on that. And you were confident that sustainability would come back from the current pushback. And you said both the insurance example, but also what's happening in the technological world made that clear.
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