Exploring less usual careers in human rights
Summary
Our guest for this episode believes that businesses can contribute to human rights and that human rights can be conducive to business. Barbara Linder focused most of her career on human rights and business. She currently works as a Senior Environmental and Social Manager for the Austrian Development Bank (OeEB), which is a private stock company with a public mandate.
Through her work, she strengthens human rights aspects in environmental and social management processes, policy development, risk assessments and capacity building regarding human rights. When you work on human rights in the private sector, you have to change your perspective, meet people where they are and present the information related to human rights in a more digestible way.
Her advice if you want to work on human rights in the private sector:
-
Study the corporate culture. What is a no-go, for what do you get points? What is the currency (e.g. knowledge)?
-
Look at your own conditioning (e.g. beliefs, expectations) that you have acquired through your educational and social background. Try to take an observer position and to understand the system and its actors without judging. You are also playing a role in the system.
-
Build fruitful networks with likeminded people that share your values.
-
Train patience and resilience and take breaks. You can only plant seeds. They will grow when the timing is right, you cannot determine that- but every seed is valuable.
Her book recommendation: Duncan Greene, How change happens.
Train patience and resilience and take breaks. You can only plant seeds. They will grow when the timing is right, you cannot determine that- but every seed is valuable.
Barbara Linder
Prior to joining the Austrian Development Bank (OeEB) as a Senior Environmental and Social Manager, Barbara was a Senior Legal Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM) where she focused on human rights in development cooperation and business, in particular state and corporate responsibilities, labour rights, land rights, access to justice and grievance mechanisms as well as financial institutions. She acted as a consultant and university lecturer. Before that, Barbara gained experience in development cooperation with the UNICEF and the Austrian Development Agency.
An Austrian national, Barbara holds a law degree of the University of Vienna, a Master degree of the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights (E.MA) in Venice, Italy. In her PhD she analysed state and corporate responsibilities for development and export credit supported projects (Human Rights, Export Credits and Development Cooperation (e-elgar.com)).