Luc Zandvliet
Since 2000, Luc has been working to support the stakeholder engagement of companies operating in frontier markets. In support of the mandate of Professor John Ruggie, the former UN Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, Luc developed human rights risk assessments for companies and tested grievance effectiveness principles.
From 2000 until 2010, Luc was the Director of the Corporate Engagement Project (CEP) at CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, a US-based non-profit. The CEP engages companies in a collaborative effort to gather lessons and develop practical management options in order to ensure that their presence has positive, rather than negative, impacts on local stakeholders. From this work, Luc wrote Getting it Right, Making Corporate-Community Relations Work, with Mary B. Anderson in 2009 (Greenleaf Publishers). The book, intended for company managers and business school students, documents best practices in company-community relations, especially in contexts of social and political instability, and is currently used by several oil and mining companies as their main guidance on the issue.
Luc then founded Triple R Alliance (TRA), a small collective of experts that has provided support to companies operating in frontier markets. Luc's approach has been to accept periodic longer term on-site managerial assignments in order to appreciate the practical challenges that social performance departments face at the field level. He has drawn on these experiences in conducting conflict/human rights impact assessments, in coaching staff and in developing influx management plans, social investment strategies and engagement approaches. Luc has conducted over 70 site visits with 25 companies (mainly in the oil and mining industries) in 20 countries, including places such as the DRC, Nigeria, Colombia, Pakistan and Papua New Guinea.
Luc co-facilitated a pilot project of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) to test the recent ICMM guide on grievance handling with eight mining companies, and has also drafted a guide on effective and sustainable social investment strategies for IPIECA. He has provided presentations for companies, governments and think tanks, focusing on industry trends, and workshops on specific topics such as social performance measurement, social risk approaches and human rights due diligence.
Before working in the corporate social performance discipline, Luc worked in the humanitarian field with the International Red Cross in Ethiopia and with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Burundi, the DRC, Uganda, Sudan, Eritrea and Sierra Leone. He is a Dutch citizen living in Canada.
