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Core labour rights have a crucial role in achieving economic prosperity and political stability on a national and global scale. The emergence of complex global trade networks has raised important questions as to how such rights could be implemented and enforced across multiple supply chains and geographical borders. Research at the Centre for Labour Market Studies, School of Management, Leicester has helped the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the EU understand the advantages and risks associated with International Framework Agreements (IFAs), particularly regarding their implementation in supply chains. IFAs have emerged as a specific instrument to secure core labour rights and shift the onus away from nation states. Between 2000 and 2013 the number of IFAs in operation around the world increased from five to more than 100, directly benefiting more than 10 million workers and indirectly benefiting tens of millions more. Leicester research has played a part in understanding the dynamics of IFAs and developing more effective ones.
The team has conducted research on environmentally friendly practices in furniture manufacturing for developing countries such as Bosnia, Ghana, Malaysia, Thailand, Romania and Vietnam in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and the European Union Erasmus Multilateral Projects programme. The developed practices were used to protect traditional skills in furniture-making crafts in areas affected by war, in the intensive labour furniture sector of tropical timber producing countries and in temperate countries. Such environmentally friendly practices have impacted on production and employment.
A major challenge to economic policy and public sector governance is how to provide a sustainable economic basis for less prosperous localities and neighbourhoods. Research findings demonstrated the need for a greater focus upon enterprise and jobs at a sub-regional level and improved co-ordination and integration of governance arrangements in order to tackle this issue. These findings influenced the development of national and local government policy and practice towards the economic development of deprived areas from 2004 onwards. Impacts were evident through shaping a significant re-orientation in policy approaches towards deprived neighbourhoods as well as the development of specific policies and governance practice.
Developing sustainable consumption and production policies and practices in industry requires analysis of technical, environmental, economic and social performance of supply chains delivering goods and services. In a programme covering the 20 years since its foundation, the University of Surrey's Centre for Environmental Strategy (CES) has played a major role in developing a systematic "whole system" approach to assessing and managing supply chains, starting from Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Management (LCM) and progressing to sustainability analysis.
This approach underpins current national and international standards and policy and is embodied in the corporate strategies of a number of major companies (for example Unilever and M&S); the approach is also starting to be adopted in guiding the development of new consumer products.
Research undertaken at the University of Manchester (UoM) highlights the need to address issues of accountability and reflexivity within the NGO sector, and has contributed towards both performance improvements within individual NGOs, as well as the strengthening of sector-wide policies. Impacts have been achieved through a process of ongoing consultation and feedback: identifying, anticipating and analysing key challenges, generating new conceptual frameworks, and building critical relations between the academy and practitioners. This contribution has been clearly acknowledged by both NGOs and other development agencies. In particular, the research has directly assisted the work of organisations and groups as varied as: governments (e.g. El Salvador's); major international NGOs based in both the global north (e.g. The One World Trust, Mango) and south (SDI, BRAC); and bilateral and multilateral aid agencies (e.g. DFID, UNRISD).
Dr Penny Vera-Sanso's two research projects, Ageing, Poverty and Neoliberalism in Urban South India (2007-10) and Ageing and Poverty: the working lives of older people in India (2012-13), have had significant impacts on public debate and public policy in relation to the rights and well-being of people aged 60 and over. The research raised awareness and understanding, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, and in India more widely, of older people's poverty and their contribution to the economy through their paid and unpaid work. This led directly to changes in state policy on pensions in Tamil Nadu, and influenced campaigns for older people's pensions, livelihoods and rights within India and internationally.
The Natural Resources Institute (NRI) of the University of Greenwich has, since the early 1990s, played a lead role in researching, developing and piloting a sustainable and transferable warehouse receipt system (WRS) that is accessible to smallholder farmers in Africa. This institutional innovation helps to overcome post-liberalisation challenges in agriculture by easing access to finance, improving crop marketing and increasing incomes for smallholder farmers. The outcome of the pilots is also influencing strategic choices by governments in developing institutions, regulations and policies which foster efficient and remunerative output markets in Africa.