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.

[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.