Project

Developing Freedom

Establishing a clear case for the global development community to prioritize anti-slavery and anti-trafficking in development programming.

Date Published
16 Sep 2023
Project Status
Completed

This project aimed to establish and promote a clear case for the global development community to prioritize anti-slavery and anti-trafficking in development programming and policies.

Sustainable Development Goal Target 8.7 commits states to fight modern slavery as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Target 8.7 underpins rallying efforts including Alliance 8.7 and the UK-initiated Call to Action. Buy-in to the Call to Action is growing (currently around 70 countries), but implementation through the global development system has so-far been limited. Major development actors (e.g. UN country teams, OECD DAC and the World Bank) are notably absent. Why?

One reason may be that the development case for fighting modern slavery has not yet been well articulated. The direct ‘pay off’ to governments and business from fighting modern slavery has not been well explained. Many governments see little reward for the costs involved in taking on the vested domestic political, transnational corporate and sometimes criminal interests that sustain modern slavery. And many corporate interests still see anti-slavery as a philanthropic exercise and cost centre, not as a profit strategy. The ‘return on investment’ has not been well identified.

This project seeks to provide evidence-based materials that will begin to fill this gap, making a clear and strong ‘development case’ for fighting modern slavery.

Case Studies

Construction and Infrastructure

Garments and Apparel

Cotton

Palm Oil

Cattle

Fisheries and Aquaculture

Recommendations

Commit to develop freedom: make maximizing economic agency a development goal.

The study argues that treating developing freedom – maximizing economic agency – as an explicit goal of global development efforts, alongside economic growth, poverty alleviation or conflict prevention. This requires:

  • Moving from safeguarding to a strategic approach, treating developing freedom as an aim of intervention, something to be prioritized and proactively pursued through lending, spending and policy advice;
  • Recognizing that pandemic recovery requires commitment to an economy that works for people – an economy that promotes their economic agency and helps them develop their freedom; and
  • Connecting anti-slavery efforts to ongoing development work on resilience, empowerment and governance.

Slavery-proof development pathways: use the developmental role of the State to maximize economic agency.

The study argues for rethinking the developmental role of the State, to focus not just on economic growth and social development, but on maximizing people’s economic agency. Pandemic recovery policies should not promote protectionist policies, but rather harness the increased State presence in economies brought about by COVID-19 to promote a more equal, entrepreneurial and educational growth model than is currently offered in models of incorporation into Global Value Chains. We suggest aligning this model on five lines:

  • Emphasizing human capital formation, including investment in education, life-long learning and skills development, and fostering migrant education, skills recognition and skills development;
  • Promoting entrepreneurialism and wealth pre-distribution, through improvements to labour market mobility, financial inclusion, and capital formation – for example through promoting retirement savings, democratizing ownership of new technologies such as green technologies and industrial robots, and fostering use of cooperative production systems;
  • Providing safety nets, to protect in crisis and encourage responsible risk-taking, through wage insurance schemes, protection floors, access to healthcare and childcare, and strengthened government-to-person (G2P) platforms;
  • Promoting high-skilled growth, for example through industrial policy promoting skills-intensive exports backed up by necessary education, training, wage policy and incentives for private investment; and
  • Reducing inequality of economic agency, through progressive taxation, effective competition policy and executive compensation rules.

Supply freedom: turn global value chain practices towards responsible business conduct.

The study argues for development actors to use their resources and leverage to encourage responsible business conduct in global value chains, prioritizing sectors and value-chains where COVID-19 has most severely reduced economic agency. Development actors should encourage companies and suppliers to which they are connected to protect people as effective economic agents, for the long-term health of the whole economy. This includes:

  • Protecting workers’ health, incomes and livelihoods, through workplace safety measures, maintaining supplier relationships, promoting wage subsidies, loan guarantees and flexible payment arrangements. Remedial measures may also be needed where supplier decisions have contributed to or caused increased modern slavery risks.
  • Working together, through joint approaches to high-risk supply-chains, social dialogue, promoting worker voice, managing migrant labour repatriations, and mobilizing around share GVC transformation plans.

Realizing these goals may require working across multiple institutional levels and action in new forums (such as the UN Regional Economic Commissions and Regional Fisheries Management Organizations). Pandemic recovery offers a new start – a chance for governments and development actors to work with value-chain stakeholders to reshape those value chains, collaborating, rather than competing. This could begin with the development of a set of shared expectations of suppliers in high-risk value chains – such as PPE.

Finance freedom: use development finance to reduce modern slavery risks.

The study argues for the development sector to take a more active role using its collective leverage to shape how capital markets address modern slavery risks. In the short term, during pandemic recovery, this should focus on keeping people afloat, by:

  • Increasing liquidity at all levels, to help governments and enterprises access needed resources, including by enlisting intermediary financial institutions;
  • A microfinance rescue plan, to ensure that hundreds of millions of at-risk households and enterprises survive the global economic downturn; and
  • Increasing digital financial inclusion, using the opportunity created by the crisis to invest in efforts to address the 1.7 billion people who remain unbanked, and to improve access to working capital for the SMEs and micro-contractors that may be most prone to use forced labour.

In the longer term, the focus should be on collective leverage to ensure capital markets accurately price modern slavery risks, including:

  • Coordinated exclusion of known modern slavery risks from public financing, lending and investment;
  • Active participation in the construction of a harmonized ESG risk information infrastructure;
  • Systemic risk monitoring to identify when privately incurred ESG risks are reaching toxic levels; and
  • Concerted action to tackle illicit financial flows connected to systematic forced labour, including stolen asset recovery and disrupting the recruitment fee system.

Organize communities for freedom: empower stakeholders to maximize economic agency.

The study identifies community organization and strategic coordination as central requirements for developing freedom. Slavery is not only an economic, but a political system, that redistributes wealth from labour to coercive capital. Disrupting slavery systems has always generated a political backlash and will do so in future. To develop freedom therefore requires effective community organization – from the local to the global level. We argue for:

  • Creating a Developing Freedom Forum, where development actors can share information, learn lessons, and develop a coordinated strategy to apply in a coordinated manner across different institutional settings and global value chains.
  • Developing new tools for tracking progress, including new Development Assistance Committee (DAC) programming codes, and common monitoring and evaluation variables,
  • Joint value-chain mapping and transformation planning, to develop shared understandings of how modern slavery risks can be addressed in specific sectors.

 

Research output:

Developing Freedom: The Sustainable Development Case for Ending Modern Slavery, Forced Labour, Human Trafficking

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