First Round Table meeting of the CSR Multi Stakeholder Forum 

General presentations on CSR opened the first Round Table meeting that provided an overview of the status of CSR in Europe and around the world. The next agenda point was a series of presentations of experience with corporate-stakeholder partnerships gathered through working together with the objective of developing the best CSR strategy. In this context, Danone acquainted the participants with its cooperation with the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations; Insight Investment described its work with Amnesty International; and Norsk Hydro talked about its collaboration with Transparency International Norway.

As the last agenda point, the participants drew as conclusion the need for further education on CSR to raise the level of common understanding of this concept. In particular, CSR principles should penetrate into companies; the management at every level should act in the spirit of good CSR practice. The participants also agreed that governments should do more to help empowerment.

The first round table meeting was generally felt to be a constructive and successful one. Nevertheless, some participants agreed that while the round tables in the first wave will stick to a similar structure, ie. joint presentations followed by discussions, the second wave of round tables could be a bit more dynamic, perhaps organised into workshops.