ABSTRACT
Human rights abuses abound in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s mining sector – teenage boys and girls work 16-hour shifts in extremely hazardous mines. The companies that got together under the Responsible Minerals Initiative umbrella a decade ago had been confronted with evidence showing the connection between 3TGs and conflict. In the consumer electronics industry, companies decided they had to do something collectively. A more ambitious type of collaboration is the cooperation between a number of firms and a single non-governmental organization (NGO), which can be sectoral or regional in nature. When Caterpillar opened a production facility in the Brazilian city of Piracicaba, it and several other local firms ended up supporting a new regional development NGO. The Network for Business Sustainability report shows clearly that choosing between different ways to collaborate depends on the company and the issue it wants to tackle. Beyond the cooperation–competition dichotomy, the authors identify important subsidiary properties on the formal– informal front.
