Private View Blog: Why public-private partnerships are key to beating pandemic

A Covid-19 blog post by a senior strategist at Oxfam recently asked: “Where’s the private sector?” The author remarked that businesses seemed to “have gone missing”, and the pandemic had become a conversation between governments and NGOs.

May’s Edelman Trust Barometer noted that only 29 per cent of respondents think CEOs are doing an outstanding job responding to the pandemic. This compares with scientists and government leaders with ratings of more than 50 per cent.

Filling the gaps

Yet imaginative alliances are springing up between companies, public authorities, churches and international organisations on every continent. These aim to fill gaps in the provision of medical equipment, protect communities from the fallout of the pandemic, and keep local economies going. So what more should companies do in the face of coronavirus?

It has been clear for some years in countries affected by crisis and conflict, that companies have a role in helping to deliver peace, sustainable development and security. They operate in places where government is absent or dysfunctional, and they combine local knowledge with national and international connections, logistics and resources. This makes them highly effective in tackling threats to local populations. More than just providing jobs or investment, business has the potential for creating positive impacts and real change, but it needs to work with others, creating shared agendas that benefit both people and profits. Call it improving wellbeing or human security, meaning focusing on what people need to lead tolerable lives, harnessing corporate responsibility will be part of dealing with corona virus and its aftermath.

Done it before

Covid-19 is not the first time that business has helped to cope with a health pandemic. In 2014, 400 international companies got together to form the Ebola Private Sector Mobilisation group (EPSMG) in west Africa. EPSMG became an information exchange, pooling equipment from trucks to machinery, to support national healthcare systems confronting the deadly Ebola virus, and also ensuring the epidemic remained on the radar of global policy-makers. In April, EPSMG was reactivated across west Africa in response to Covid-19.

When lives and livelihoods are on the line, and the full consequences of the pandemic are only starting to become apparent, companies need to go beyond just complying with social distancing rules, or looking after their own workers. An ethics of ‘do no harm’ is a minimal requirement in the face of widespread vulnerability.

Human rights defenders are rightly concerned that companies will cut corners to protect profits. Yet holding companies accountable for abuses should not blind us to the potential for ‘ramping up’ corporate responsibility as a positive response to the pandemic.

In already fragile countries where Covid-19 has dramatic implications for crime, conflict, gender violence, social divisions and hunger, business is stepping in with proactive measures, mobilising volunteers, diverting resources and becoming important sources of help for local populations.

This offers a glimpse into a new kind of social contract where governments alone cannot deal with the wide-ranging consequences of coronavirus. Business, alongside community organisations and local authorities, needs to become a trusted partner in finding solutions and ways out of the crisis.

Time to change

The pandemic will also force companies to change how they do their core business. As countries attempt to exit lockdowns, companies are being asked to find ways of working safely that mean assuming commitments for the health and wellbeing of not only their workers and contractors, but arguably those who come into contact with them as well. Thus coronavirus is not just about imagining new roles for companies. It rewrites the corporate responsibility playbook.  It should also force a rethink of what we understand by the idea of ‘sustainability’ which has driven many corporate social agendas in recent years. Simply targeting one or two Sustainable Development Goals such as minimising emissions or even improving healthcare, will begin to look like lip service.  Supporting human security in all its diversity, working with communities to address a mosaic of issues that affect people’s lives, and contributing to building resilience to external shocks must become a core facet of behaviour that is integrated into business models.

For investors this means considering novel ingredients in the mix of factors that influence valuations. Should companies be assessed according to how they act within their ‘sphere of influence’ covering employees, consumers and extending to whole communities? Social impact will become a distinguishing characteristic of the ‘good’ company for measurement purposes, requiring new metrics to capture this. The strength of local supply chains and the capacity to adapt production in the face of crisis may become more significant markers of corporate value in future. 

As business, like all of us, learns to live with Covid-19, creative responses to the crisis will provide early lessons on how society can ensure both  personal and economic health in the longer run.

Mary Martin is a senior policy fellow at LSE and director at UN Business and Human Security Initiative, LSE IDEAS.