Background Paper: the New OECD Guidelines

The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (OECD Guidelines for short) define recommendations by governments for responsible business conduct in all areas where a company interacts with society. This makes these guidelines one of the most important international frameworks for sustainable corporate governance, alongside the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the core labour standards of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The OECD Guidelines are regularly updated in collaboration with companies, trade unions and non-governmental organisations. In June 2023, the OECD member countries adopted the most recent of these updates. This has led to far-reaching changes, particularly in the environmental chapter. The OECD Guidelines are thus responding to current challenges of sustainable corporate governance with regard to climate change, circularity, biodiversity protection and deforestation, among others. 

This background paper explores the significance of the update of the environmental chapter for policy, legislation and business. It starts off with a presentation of the OECD Guidelines and the contents of the new environmental chapter. This is then followed by examples of selected laws where the OECD Guidelines were taken into consideration, other governmental measures as well as corporate practice in the form of multi-stakeholder initiatives. Finally, an outlook is given on how the recommendations from the updated environmental chapter could be applied by various actors.

The background paper was prepared to accompany an event organised by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) in September 2023, which publicly acknowledges and presents the updates in the environmental chapter of the OECD Guidelines.