Stakeholder Engagement is increasingly seen as a must for any socially or environmentally friendly company, and thousands of NGO-corporate partnerships have been launched over the past decade.  As stakeholder engagement is becoming a mainstream business tool, there is a need to examine the effectiveness of approaches.  The panel will be looking at lessons from around the world including:
   
• How stakeholder engagement impact is best measured and monitored
• How stakeholder engagement can be integrated into local development plans
• How stakeholder engagement can help manage reputations risks

Richard Welford is Chairman of CSR Asia. He has twenty years of experience working in the fields of environmental management and social responsibility. He was one of the early pioneers in developing social audit and reporting methodologies with UK-based organisations such as The Body Shop, IBM and Eastern Electricity in the 1990s. Since then, his work has been increasingly Asian focused as a result of his current position as director of the Corporate Environmental Governance Programme at the University of Hong Kong. He has sat on the Swire Environmental Committee as an external adviser for the past four years and has undertaken consultancy work with a number of leading companies, including the MTR Corporation, Disney, CLP, Nike, Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, HP, HSBC, Citigroup and Adidas.
 
Richard’s work has had a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability and social justice. Richard has worked with Cathay Pacific and the Swire group developing a climate change strategy. He has also worked on policies and implementation plans covering conservation and biodiversity. For Shangri-La Hotels he is developing initiatives not only covering environmental sustainability but also aspects of human rights and local community engagement. He has been an advocate of human rights auditing as a means of ensuring social justice and has undertaken assessments of the Freeport Human Rights audit in Papua.