Singapore Compact is a national society that was founded in 2005 to promote corporate social responsibility. The formation of this ‘watchdog’ increased the awareness and development of CSR on the island city–state. Singapore Compact notes that some businesses associate CSR with philanthropy and charity, but asserts that companies should do much more:

Corporate Social Responsibility is essentially about businesses doing well and doing good at the same time. CSR is about the long term strategy of aligning business strategy and operations with universal values to achieve positive and sustainable outcomes for customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, communities, other stakeholders and as well as the environment.

Singapore Compact suggests that if a company does this, it can look forward to increased profitability over the long term, increased employee morale and pride in their company, improved performance, and a good reputation. It adds that all of this will, in turn, prove attractive to investors.

However, Singapore Compact observes that in 2008 a Ministry of Trade and Industry survey found that only 40 per cent of 507 companies canvassed were even aware of the term CSR. Two thirds of these had implemented CSR activities. So, a lot more needs to be done in order to get companies to implement Singapore Compact’s suggested CSR strategies. By 2009, it had established a website and held an inaugural conference on corporate CSR, and in 2011 it launched an award for young CSR leaders in Singapore.

Certainly, the Singapore stock exchange takes CSR seriously, and in August 2010 ‘issued a policy statement on sustainability reporting and proposed guide for sustainability reporting for its listed companies’.

Greenpeace, however, believes that the proposals put forward by Singapore Compact and the Singapore stock exchange are not nearly enough. At the same time that the stockmarket was issuing its policy statement, Greenpeace held its own press conference to release evidence that the palm oil arm of the Sinar Mas company had been destroying Indonesia’s rainforests, despite previous promises by the company to stop. Unusually, this issue was reported in the financial section of the local paper — such confrontations with the corporate world in Singapore are rare. Greenpeace also issued a press release stating that security personnel from Sinar Mas had violently assaulted anti‐logging protestors in Indonesia. The company had also planned to acquire additional land in Papua New Guinea for logging purposes.

While Singapore Compact has made grounds towards increasing awareness of CSR and getting companies to implement CSR practices, it clearly still has a long way to go.

QUESTION

What other strategies could Singapore Compact use to raise awareness of CSR in Singapore and get more companies to implement CSR activities?