Five Years of Sector Dialogues

An English summary of the report is available here, the full report is in German only.

The sector dialogues within the German National Action Plan for Business and Human Rights (NAP) are used as a support resource for the German Government to implement human rights due diligence. After five years in operation, this particular format has certainly proved effective. In this paper however, the participating civil society organisations try to provide an overall view, and present a generally mixed picture. 

The sector dialogues show what multi-stakeholder formats can in principle achieve: they create a framework for the exchange of knowledge, experience and challenges, for building up trust between groups of actors and for the design and implementation of ambitious flagship projects (albeit limited in scope). Sector dialogues can also help sector-wide in defining the risks that exist supply chains and what appropriate, practical implementation of due diligence should look like.

However, concrete examples also show where multi-stakeholder initiatives do not (yet) succeed: the collaboration of participants is rarely used to increase the extent of influence of the companies in the supply chain. The dialogues consequently fail to fulfil the core ambition of this kind of initiative. The result is also that the sector dialogues so far only have an indirect and company-specific impact; a desirable effect has not (as yet) been achieved for those (potentially) affected in the supply chain.

Read our recommendations for the continuation and creation of new sector dialogues that will help increase the format’s impact in future, at company and sector level and in the supply chain.