Sammendrag
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights recommend to businesses the use of external expertise, stakeholder dialogue, and civil society consultation. Hence, collaboration with, for example, human rights organisations, is presented as a key tool for companies to meet their responsibility to respect human rights. This thesis takes off from these recommendations as it studies three large companies, who have indeed taken the assistance of human rights organizations in working on complex human rights situations, policy writing, risk analysis, impact assessments and reporting. The paper analyzes the actor s motivation for entering human rights based partnerships, how the partnerships work in practice and how effective they are in changing corporate behavior. It thereby offers a picture of how helpful such collaboration can be firstly, for a multinational corporation, working to heighten its human rights focus and compliance, and secondly, for human rights organization working to influence corporate human rights impact for the better. The study finds that knowledge share is at the core of the partnerships. The rise in human rights awareness and understanding of the companies actual human rights impact and risk is evident as key output from the partnerships for both partners. Consequently, open communication is identified as a decisive factor to the success of the partnerships. The integrity of the human rights organization is considered to be well kept in place through a set of partnerships conditions, as both the non-profits and the companies are interested in sustaining the legitimacy of the non-profit. Without it, the company loses an important benefit the non-profit brings to the table, namely legitimacy. Additionally, the study reveals that all partners were taking great use of the UNGPs. The partnership activities were also often directly linked to UNGP compliance. Further on, the case studies illustrate that collaborations can have significant effect at changing corporate behavior by influencing the companies way of thinking, increasing their human rights capacity and assisting change in policy and practice. Thus, the collaborations benefit the corporate actor and the non-profit, as well as the greater society. As the case studies concern five big and important actors, they indicate a clear space of opportunity concerning corporate human rights responsibility.