BENEFITS OF SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS ADVOCACY

Many governments have placed a high priority on reforming the business environment because of its significant influence on levels of private sector development and therefore on long-term economic growth and poverty reduction.

Governments are the primary actors in the design and management of business environment reforms. They develop, implement, and monitor the laws and policies that regulate business activities. However, to design effective reforms that address real business roadblocks and achieve high quality economic growth for society, the insight and cooperation of those operating under the legal and regulatory framework- companies and entrepreneurs is instrumental.

The private sector can contribute significantly to business environment reforms by helping policy makers to identify and catalogue concrete problems, develop potential policy responses, and build a sustainable constituency for reform. This process that enables companies often acting through business associations, to come together and present their concerns and solutions to governments, is an important aspect of business advocacy. Business advocacy is especially important, but also especially challenging, when governments lack the technical expertise or organizational capacities to manage reform programmes.

Proactive business engagement can foster constructive relations with government agencies and contribute to substantive reforms. If business associations act as the voice of their members and promote market reforms that that serve the whole business community, these associations can create real momentum for reform through advocacy. They are in daily contact with companies and are in a good position to understand systematic regulatory constraints on businesses. If business associations can explain pragmatically why a certain regulation is problematic and also suggest a credible solution supported by a coalition of associations and a broad constituency of stakeholders then there are a few reasons for the government not to enact it.

Truly successful advocacy efforts cannot just improve the quality of particular reform processes, but they can help create improve levels of trust, partnership and cooperation between public and private sectors. By opening the door to a constructive dialogue with government agencies on reform solutions, business advocacy enables associations to become a credible partner for policy making. This consecutively, can increase an association’s stance within the business community and help retain existing members and winning new ones. With more funding and leverage from a revived membership base, the association can engage more regularly and more actively in policy, which in turn benefits policy makers as they gain better business feedback and a stronger reform counterpart.

Developing advocacy capacities and strategies and implementing them are no easy tasks. There is often not only an atmosphere of mistrust between the business community and government agencies, but even struggles within associations to unify and motive their membership to engage proactively in business advocacy. A sense of apathy can prevail  among a business community that believes the government will not listen to what the private sector has to say. Another risk is that some companies or associations might attempt to hijack policy advocacy agenda to promote their own vested interests or try to manipulate procurement processes, for example, through collusion.

To counteract this, there is no simple blueprint for business advocacy. However, there are steps that can increase the chances of success. Effective advocacy requires the investment of knowledge, time, commitment and funds. It requires the associations identify, analyze and prioritize those issues for advocacy that affect the interests of all of its members. It is imperative to collect information from members and outside sources. It also requires reaching out to competitors and other key stakeholders to agree on a common message and joint responses in a transparent, legitimate and inclusive manner.

Development and capacity building assistance to business associations  is essential is they wish to reap the benefits of informed business inputs to policy development. This includes offering training on advocacy techniques, public consultation mechanisms and political analysis, as well as capacity building assistance on business association management, coalition building and media relations.

Business advocacy is by no means a panacea to uncompetitive business regulations and limited government support for reforms. Yet, it can be a useful tool to create demand for reforms and to build consensus and local ownership in policy making processes. Most importantly, advocacy can advance private sector participation in policy making by creating an entry point for genuine dialogue and partnership with government agencies. This dialogue does not need to be limited to competitiveness and business environment reforms, but can be applied to broader private sector issues, such as human rights, anti-corruption, environmental sustainability and health.

The ultimate reward is improved democratic governance with real, open, and transparent business participation into policy making, that produces more sensible and workable reforms that are good for the economy and society as a whole.