The Global Social Compliance Programme is a business-driven programme for the continuous improvement of working and environmental conditions in global supply chains. The GSCP was created by and for global buying companies wanting to work collaboratively on improving the sustainability (social and environmental) of their often-shared supply base. To this end, these companies are working on harmonizing existing efforts to deliver a shared, global and sustainable approach based on consensus and best existing practice.

The GSCP provides a global cross-industry platform to promote the exchange of knowledge and best existing practices in order to build comparability and transparency between existing social compliance and environmental compliance systems. To this effect, the Global Social Compliance Programme has developed a set of Reference tools and processes that describe best existing practices and provide a common interpretation of working and environmental requirements and their implementation at supplier level. This approach will enable mutual recognition between existing systems using the GSCP Reference tools as a benchmark through the Equivalence Process, and allow for simpler buying.

The GSCP is ultimately working towards remediation of root causes to non-compliances, aiming at supplier ownership of solutions and their implementation. The Programme will support remediation through a collaborative approach to capacity building at supplier site, and the launch of working groups to tackle onground topics requiring cross-industry guidelines.