Human & Indigenous Rights Integrated Management Education: The Core Principles and Practices for Educating Globally Responsible Business Leaders.

In 2007, the international community finalized a set of principled-rights to guarantee the protection, respect and self-determination collective rights of indigenous people. The so-called United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) reaffirmed the Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) as specific right and process to follow before the start of any development project affecting their lands or resources. The UNDRIP Article 10 reaffirmed and clarified the international convention ILO 169 utilized in numerous countries to defend and guarantee indigenous rights. In 2008, Prof. John Ruggie of Harvard University and UN Special Representative for Business and Human Rights assignments proposed measures to strengthen the human rights performance of the business sector around the world. Its work resulted in a framework resting on three principled pillars for protection (the state’s duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business), respect (corporate responsibility to respect human rights) and remedy (greater access by victims to effectively remedy, both judicial and non-judicial). In spite of these important advancements to making business congruent with human rights, management education has largely ignored this body of work and only superficially approached these principles and paradigms in business ethics. Yet, the Human Rights Principles in the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and the human rights working groups on the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) encourage academia to get up to speed with adequate integration of human rights normative into our business and management curricula and pedagogies. This paper reviews these principles as they apply to a number of emerging concerns into the business communities as suggested by the Business and Human Rights Resource Center (emerged as follow up to Ruggie’s work) among other portals that can be used as resources for integrating principles, cases and best practices. The analysis of cases will draw from international perspectives, review issues and suggest tools to increase capacity to prevent, detect, analyse indigenous & human rights impact of businesses. The best practices paradigms emerged from the analysis include multi-stakeholders and multi-sector solutions for democratic and collective decision making in development projects affecting human and indigenous rights. We will review cases in which management students have been immersed into indigenous contexts and struggles as in the case of Chiapas, Mexico. The reviewed cases at the international level will analyze extractive industries responsibilities toward human rights and development-induced displacement in relation to the rights of indigenous people. The analysis and presentation reviews specific cases inherent to Latin America and Mexico and suggest resources for business-management education to be knowledgeable of governmental/intergovernmental frameworks as well as nongovernmental/civil society networks. By using a comparative and gap analysis on the Jesuit business educational programs, the paper/presentation will suggest curricula resources to advance the integration of human and indigenous rights in Jesuit universities and business schools.