Responsible Business: When Budget Is the Problem

21 April 2026 · By Claire Lynch

This is the first in a series of posts addressing the real, operational challenges faced by the people responsible for human rights due diligence (HRDD), ESG and ethical trade inside organisations. If you have a problem you’d like addressed in a future post, share it via our contact form.

Let’s start with the honest part.

Limited budget, a small team, and responsibility for work that touches every part of the business is genuinely hard. This is not a problem that can be entirely designed away. The practitioners doing this work in under-resourced environments are often carrying disproportionate responsibility – and the advice that tells them to simply “prioritise” or “do more with less” can feel glib when the gap between what the work requires and what the resource allows is large.

So before the practical guidance, a genuine acknowledgement: if you are in this position, the difficulty is real. The goal of this post is not to pretend otherwise, but to offer some approaches – drawn from my own experience – that can make a meaningful difference.

Start with what already exists internally

The most common discovery when working with under-resourced teams is that relevant work is already happening across the organisation – it just isn’t currently being identified as HRDD, counted as HRDD, or connected to the person or team responsible for it.

• Procurement teams conducting supplier assessments.
• Legal teams tracking regulatory exposure.
• HR managing labour standards in direct operations.
• Sustainability teams collecting supplier data.

None of this may be labelled human rights due diligence, but much of it is — or can be, with the right framing and a small amount of coordination.

Mapping what already exists before deciding what needs to be built from scratch is one of the highest-return activities available to a practitioner with limited resource. Importantly; it also builds the cross-functional relationships that are essential for everything that follows.

Prioritise – then be proportionate

These are related but distinct concepts, and both matter when resource is limited.

Prioritisation is about deciding where to focus – which geographies, commodities, supplier relationships and business practices get your attention first, based on where the evidence says the risks are most severe. A risk-based assessment that identifies your highest-priority issues gives you a defensible, evidence-based case for concentrating your limited resource where it matters most. It also gives you something concrete to show leadership: not “we can’t do everything” but “here is where the evidence says we should focus, and here is why.” (Note: prioritisation is essential when resource is limited, but how you do it when your capacity is constrained is a question worth its own dedicated post. I’ll come back to it.)

Proportionality is about how much effort to apply once you’ve decided where to focus. The depth of assessment, the intensity of engagement and the scale of the response should be calibrated to the severity and likelihood of the risk/impact. You don’t apply the same level of scrutiny to a low-risk Tier 1 supplier in a well-regulated market as you do to a high-risk Tier 2 supplier in a complex sourcing environment. Proportionality gives you permission to apply less depth in lower-risk areas – which frees up resource for the areas that warrant more.

Together, prioritisation and proportionality are your most important tools for making limited resource go further. The alternative – spreading thinly across everything – tends to produce a superficial picture of everything and protect no one meaningfully.

Use the free resources that already exist

Before looking outward to membership bodies or external support, it is worth taking stock of the free guidance, tools and data that already exist in your sector. There is considerably more than most practitioners realise.

The international frameworks – the UN Guiding Principles, the OECD Due Diligence Guidance – are the starting point, but the more immediately useful resources for a practitioner under resource pressure tend to be the ones that translate those frameworks into sector-specific practice:

• Industry-specific guidance documents that set out what HRDD looks like in garments and footwear, or food and agriculture, or extractives, for example
• Published human rights impact assessments from companies operating in similar contexts, which give a concrete picture of what rigorous assessment looks like in practice.
• Sector-level risk analyses and country-level guidance produced by multi-stakeholder initiatives, NGOs and development organisations.
• Audit frameworks and assessment tools developed by industry bodies that can be adapted rather than built from scratch.

The point is not that these resources replace the work – they don’t. It is that a practitioner who maps what already exists in their sector before deciding what to commission or create will almost certainly find that a proportion of the insights they need are already there. The job is to use and apply existing information, not to reinvent it.

Use your ecosystem

Once you have mapped internal resource and free external tools, look outward to the broader ecosystem of peer networks, sector initiatives and multi-stakeholder bodies in your industry.

These are not soft options. Depending on your sector, bodies such as (for example)

• UN Global Compact
• the Ethical Trading Initiative,
• Fair Wear Foundation,
• AIM-Progress,
• the Consumer Goods Forum,
• Food Network for Ethical Trade,
• Ethical Tea Partnership, or
• ICMM

can offer peer learning, technical guidance, supplier engagement tools, training resources and/or the collective leverage that comes from multiple brands collaborating pre-competitively or making the same ask of shared suppliers. Membership costs money, but the resource it provides typically far exceeds what a small team could build independently.

Peer networks also matter for a less obvious reason: they normalise practice. When you are trying to make the case internally for greater investment in HRDD, being able to point to what peer organisations are doing – and the standards they are being held to – is one of the most effective arguments available.

Make the case for more resource – and know which argument to lead with

Limited resource is not just something to manage around. It is something you can actively work to change. And the practitioners who do this most effectively tend to be the ones who understand which argument will land with their particular leadership.

There is no single lever that works universally. The right approach depends on reading your organisation – what it responds to, what it fears, what it values. But in my experience, the arguments that tend to have most traction are:

• The risk argument. Embedding HRDD is a risk management cost, not a values cost. Risk is a familiar language. Framing it in terms of litigation exposure, regulatory liability, UFLPA detentions, reputational damage – things with numbers attached – tends to land with boards and finance functions in a way that ethical commitments alone do not. The Dyson settlement and the Yves Rocher ruling are useful here: these are not abstract risks, they are recent, real, and expensive.

• The commercial argument. Lost contracts, supply chain disruption, market access conditions imposed by larger customers – these are commercial consequences that procurement and commercial teams understand. If your organisation’s customers are asking for HRDD evidence as a condition of doing business, that is a revenue argument, not a compliance argument.

• The performance management argument. This is one of the most underused and most effective levers available. If HRDD metrics become part of procurement performance management – supplier risk scores, purchasing practices compliance, audit finding resolution rates – then procurement resource becomes HRDD resource without requiring a separate budget line. The work gets done because it is built into how the function is measured, not because a separate team is trying to drive it from the outside.

• The benchmarking argument. External data on where your organisation sits relative to peers and competitors — WBA scores, KnowTheChain benchmarks, sector assessments, etc. — can be a powerful prompt for leadership that finds it easier to respond to competitive positioning than to abstract risk. Nobody wants to be at the bottom of a public ranking.

In practice, the most effective approach is usually a combination. Knowing which to lead with is your key skill – and this means understanding what your leadership responds to. Start with the argument most likely to get you in the room, and build from there.

Know when to bring in external support

One of the most important judgement calls for a practitioner with limited internal resource is knowing when to bring in external expertise – and being able to make that case internally.

Targeted external support is not a sign that the internal function is inadequate. It is a recognition that some aspects of HRDD require specialist knowledge, independent credibility, or a level of capacity that it is neither efficient nor realistic to maintain in-house year-round.

A human rights impact assessment in a high-risk sourcing context.

A gap analysis against CS3D requirements.

A training initiative for procurement teams.

A sector-specific risk assessment that requires deep contextual knowledge.

An impact measurement framework/monitoring structure that enables you to track effectiveness.

The right external support at the right moment can do several things simultaneously: bring the expertise and rigour the work requires, lend credibility to findings that need to be heard by leadership, and significantly increase the effective capacity of a small team at key points in the HRDD cycle. It is also, in many cases, more cost-effective than building that capacity permanently in-house.

The internal case for this kind of targeted investment tends to land best when it is framed around specific deliverables with clear outcomes — not “we need more support” but “we need this specific piece of work done to this standard, and here is why it matters.”

Finally

None of the above makes limited resource easy. But in my experience, the practitioners who make most progress in these circumstances tend to share a few characteristics: they are clear about where to focus, they build cross-functional relationships before they need them, they use their ecosystem actively, and they are persistent and strategic about making the case for investment.

The work is hard. It also matters. The people doing it under genuine resource pressure deserve more recognition than they typically get. Keep going!

What’s your biggest operational challenge as a practitioner responsible for HRDD, ESG or ethical trade? Share it with us at info@clairelynchconsulting.com (or via the contact form) and it may become the subject of a future post in this series.

Claire Lynch Consulting is a business and human rights advisory practice specialising in social impact, human rights due diligence and responsible sourcing. We help organisations move from insight to impact.