THE ROAD TO GLOBAL GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS

Government Affairs is an important strategic activity for companies to gain market access and to strengthen their position in any market by triggering new demand. When it is well designed and deployed, a Government Affairs plan becomes indispensable for anticipating strategic trends, building and maintaining a strong reputation, influencing public policy and finding common grounds with key stakeholders.

Although Government Affairs techniques are often considered similar for most regions in the world, Global Government Affairs professionals recognize that differences in "style and substance" remain whether a company is active in Washington, Brussels, New Delhi, Beijing, or any other capitals where government policies and decisions are shaping a company's business environment. These distinctive local features, however, seem to be all influenced by the same global trends. Particularly relevant to companies operating on a global basis are:

• Managing the over-abundance of stakeholders, sources and forms of content, information and knowledge;
• Creating public consensus to promote sustainability and social responsibility in all economic and business fields;
• Acknowledging the growing importance of stakeholder management as public decision-making processes which are constantly gaining in transparency
• Endorse greater government intrusion and the trend to create more public private partnerships (PPPs).

In order to be or remain successful, companies need to develop a global understanding of the issues affecting the needs of their stakeholders. In a world of abundant information, the capacity to gather the key strategic intelligence i.e. updated information as well as relevant recommendations is the prerequisite for any company.

Sustainability challenges have to be met first and foremost by the policy-makers and the corporate world. Important developments around sustainability have to be monitored and this calls for intelligence gathering. Secondly, companies are best placed to find the right balance between what is realistic or not, and thus finding the right balance between sharing best practice and benchmarking while defending their interests in front of policy-makers asking for unachievable goals.This is only one reason why "openness" to stakeholder dialogue is something that any company should be prepared for.  The typical approach to representation of corporate interests which consist in most cases of lobbying government officials and let them be the refereees deciding what information to use is fading away.

Stakeholder management is not and should not be a reserved area for public officials. For more and more companies, it is becoming part of the key objectives along intelligence gathering and advocacy work. Managing "issues" without managing the respective stakeholders makes less and less sense. The good news is that many approaches to successfully manage relationships with stakeholders already exist, and are constantly further developed to deal with the complexity of such situations.

Increasingly a large variety of public private partnerships (PPPs) whatever their scope and objectives are seeing the day and companies that are prepared to follow such a trend will become key players.

If these trends are all global, capturing their essence as strategic feed will depend on corporate leadership to invest regionally or locally. Becoming a global player is a complex project. As often this is not quite an end in itself that will transform any company but rather the road taken to achieve it.