Public administration in general must recover the confidence of citizens in public institutions through responsible and transparent management. This loss of confidence is often attributed to the feeling of bureaucratic slowness to respond to new challenges, opaque management practices, bad practices in the management of interests and, although in isolated cases, public corruption. For this reason, some of the main inductors of good governance impulse in the public sector that can be transmitted to show the public the commitment to ethical values are:
- increasing transparency in management;
- promoting the culture of public ethics;
- managing the social, environmental, economic or occupational impacts that occur.
Diputació de Barcelona is aware of these elements and believes that only through the integration of social responsibility (SR) in the corporate strategy is it possible to take on the challenges that current society poses to the public administrations. It has therefore set out to develop a model of integral management of SR. This is understood to be the voluntary integration of social, environmental, economic, labour and good governance concerns in the development of the activities of the organisation and in its relationship with its stakeholders. For this reason, the institution decided to integrate RS into the corporate strategy as an innovative management model, aimed at ensuring continuous improvement and promoting sustainable development, as well as helping to build a better society.
Along these lines, Diputació de Barcelona has developed a comprehensive and integrated SR model: integral, as the model includes responsible actions related to the five dimensions of the SR – social, environmental, labour, economic and good governance. It manages actions developed for all the functional areas of the corporation, an aspect that implies the entire organisational structure and it is integrated by being embedded in the corporate strategy.
The framework of the Diputació de Barcelona Corporate Social Responsibility Master Plan was approved in December 2014 by the plenary session of the corporation, and is reissued annually. It is an instrument that allows the organisation to be qualified as responsible in the fields of good government, labour, social, environmental and economics. Therefore, an application was made to the EPSA awards to reflect the replicability we want to give to our region’s municipalities and to the local governments in particular, which constitute our main stakeholder.
Since the implementation of the SR Strategy, the impact of its measures is positively increasing both in the own institution but also at municipalities it works with. Within the framework of the project, 40 SR referent technicians of the different corporate areas have been mobilised, with whom there is a permanent contact and periodic meetings (individually and through the collective assemblies). These referent technicians, in turn, act as partners of SR with the rest of the people in their area, generating a system that has extended SR to the whole organisation. As to the impact in municipalities, 10 local governments have been assessed in social responsibility matters, 350 local government workers have been formed and 354 136 inhabitants of the Barcelona region are the target public of the support given until now to the municipalities in the field of social responsibility. The reason why Diputació de Barcelona has committed to transferring this management system to local governments in this region, is so they can replicate the model in their organisation and their territory, to promote or strengthen their corporate social responsibility.
Working from the base, with each of the small municipalities in the territory, the intention is to widen the social responsibility network and establish a socially responsible territory (SRT). This entails the implementation of policies aiming at the enhancement of regional sustainability through collaboration initiatives that are beneficial to all stakeholders (public sector, corporate sector and non-profit organisations). In this context there are regional economic, social and environmental challenges to face, to achieve global sustainable development.