The main objective of the Green Business Asia (GBA) Project is to develop and promote enterprise-level approaches that improve productivity and contribute to “greening” the economy. This is done by enhancing worker-management relations to include environmental performance as among the key objectives for the enterprise, and jointly work on activities that best demonstrates this. GBA aims to encourage social partnerships and dialogue to promote environment friendly activities of enterprises. At the sector level, these enterprises will be supported to collaborate on common environmental performance indicators, fostering the move to become a more sustainable production chain.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) Green Jobs initiative and with support from the Government of Japan through technical cooperation partnership, is implementing the GBA Project in the Philippines and Thailand. The project interventions are geared to increase awareness and build capacity of the tripartite (employers, workers & government) partners to respond to environmental pressures brought about by climate change and unsustainable production processes. It allows the development and testing of production approaches that will result to increased productivity and sustainability, using delivery methods built on existing structures between workers and employers. The GBA interventions are oriented to ensure the availability of mechanisms to support and sustain greener enterprise activities, advocacy within the sector and tripartite capacity building. GBA will contribute to Millennium Development Goals (MDG) on reducing poverty and ensuring environmental sustainability, and is aligned to ILO programs on decent and productive work, as well as greener growth strategies for a resilient economy.

GBA is being implemented from 2010 to 2012 (2.5 years), with ECOP as the main partner for the Enterprise Level Initiative (ELI), which involves the implementation of plant-level activities involving 10-15 pilot companies. ECOP will anchor the GBA project implementation with existing supply chains of selected ECOP member companies. A preliminary study done for the Philippine GBA project identified the automotive and parts manufacturing as the pilot sector for the ELI. ECOP’s approach will be to work with member companies in the automotive assembly sector as entry points, to gain access and introduce support to the 3rd and 4th tier of their supply chains, which will be the beneficiaries of enterprise-based action learning.

Labor and other relevant policy issues will also be integrated in this project. The importance of the role of unions/labor groups will be articulated in the ELI component. ECOP will use social dialogue to bring in the tripartite process, which will become the platform for managing agreements on labor, productivity and environmental issues.