 Under the content of Enhancing Corporate Social Responsibility in Iran and Turkey Project, second roundtable meeting between Iranian and Turkish Business People was held on 26th May 2010 in Iran Chamber of Commerce in Tehran.
CSR Turkey and CSR Iran Associations started the project in January 2009 to raise the awareness of human rights, labor rights, corruption and environmental issues (as the main themes of CSR) throughout society and among key stakeholders; as well as to develop international partnerships for dialogue and understanding between Turkey and Iran.
Throughout the project, members of CSR Turkey and CSR Iran Associations came together several times to compare the CSR understanding of two countries. Both associations prepared reports and shared them with stakeholders. To inform wider society and to get direct feedbacks from stakeholders, two associations organized a roundtable meeting in Istanbul in 24th October 2009 with the participation of Iranian business people. The second and last roundtable meeting of the project was organized in Tehran.
In the roundtable meeting members of CSR Iran and CSR Turkey presented their reports about the baseline condition of CSR in Turkey and Iran. Turkish Delegation of 10 business people and the Iranian participants from various sectors presented their views about the condition of CSR in Turkey and Iran.
Roundtable meeting was moderated by Chairman of Atieh Companies Group, Bijan Khajepour who is a significant private sector leader in Iran about international relations and CSR applications. In this mind stimulating meeting general discussion topics and the common comments about the condition of CSR in the region can be summarized as below:
- Both countries suffer from insufficient dignity showed to CSR reporting. In Turkey some corporations may consider CSR as projects rather than an ethical vision; therefore once they completed their CSR applications they finished their
involvement to CSR related actions. These firms are mostly seeking advertorial purposes over their pseudo-CSR actions. In Iran, another problem is philanthropic actions are considered sometimes as a religious task by rich people, and they do not want to mention their attempts because they believe these attempts should be kept as a secret between individual and God. They believe they should not show them as matters of arrogance. In either way, recording CSR applications could be problematical sometimes in Turkey and Iran.
- Representatives of both countries complain about popular trends in CSR applications. As ‘pop-CSR’ implementations, insincere projects about education, environment and children might affect CSR awareness negatively.
- Participators of both countries believe Turkey and Iran can contribute to essential CSR subtopics namely workers’ rights, transparency, gender equality and accountability with their shared cultural heritage and common cultural and economic grounds.
- However, there should be a dramatic transformation in these countries to transform cultural characteristics in favor to modern CSR understanding and terminology. One important example and comment made by moderator Khajepour himself. He mentioned that both Turkish and Iranian people are known by their intense hospitality and cooperativeness, however when we come to traffic, we see drivers are very harsh, rude and selfish. Therefore cultural source not necessarily affects the actual life directly. Transforming culture, towards modern CSR awareness should be the endeavor of corporations and civil society organizations in these countries.
- In both countries, corporations showed insufficient eagerness to use CSR international standards, commitments, models or reporting initiatives. One reason is international models are not completely compatible to Iran and Turkey. The content of international reporting models may appear as irrelevant for corporations. Organizations in Iran and Turkey can not truly reflect their performances with these models. Consequently a need for reporting initiative for
this region appears as a necessity, to create a general framework for CSR awareness and applications of organizations.
In Iran visit, Turkish Delegation could also find the opportunity to visit first CSR Solutions Marketplace Event of Iran. Moreover, Turkish Delegation visited various civil society organizations in Tehran and Meshed. While Enhancing CSR in Iran and Turkey project came to end, participants of the project events presented their good wishes for the continuation of future collaboration of two countries to reach better standards about CSR not only in the two countries, but also in the region.
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