All change for AA1000SES

The most commonly used standard on stakeholder engagement is to be revamped and republished next year.

Consultations on changes to the AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard, known as AA1000SES, have begun with workshops around the world, and will continue online for several months.

The UK-based think tank AccountAbility, which introduced AA1000SES in 2005, will use an ‘open source’ process, whereby interested parties can post suggested changes to working documents on the web. It used the method last year when revising its assurance standard, attracting 4500 comments from 90 countries.

Alan Knight, head of standards, said a revision had been made necessary by recent rapid change. ‘Practice in this area has moved on significantly over the past four years, and it’s now time to capture these advances and move the benchmark forward,’ he said.

‘Also, the original standard was focused on the CSR community, but stakeholder engagement is now core to all organizational practice, so the revised standard will have a much broader focus.’

Knight said AccountAbility would finalize and publish the new standard ‘in late 2010’. Its development will be overseen by a technical committee.