When I joined UNDP to help establish its first initiative focused on business and human rights – B+HR Asia –  I told myself it would be a six-month assignment: set up the basics, get things moving, and then head home. 

That was nearly a decade ago. At the time, the idea that human rights could be built into trade, investment, and business governance in Asia  felt idealistic.  The UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) were adopted in 2011, but the Asia-Pacific region – home to the world's most complex supply chains and fastest-growing economies – faced a critical gap. Business and human rights issues were discussed robustly at the global level, but the willingness and capacity to implement the standards at regional and local levels remained underexplored. In practice, most governments lacked policy frameworks to implement these standards, most companies operated without clear guidance on their human rights responsibilities, and affected people had limited pathways to remedy when things went wrong. Our team was trying to plant a seed in a continent dominated by growth metrics, not governance indicators.

We had no blueprint, no precedent, and certainly no guarantee of political traction. What we did have was a stubbornly idealistic team, diverse and passionate, united by a fierce conviction that markets could serve people, and that growth could translate into progress for those driving it. 

Looking back, the journey is best understood not as a straight line, but through a series of firsts – moments where something crossed a threshold and never fully retreated. 

First #1: The untested regional BHR experiment

Our first, and perhaps most consequential, step was deciding to approach business and human rights (BHR) as a regional initiative in its own right. 

When B+HR Asia began, there was almost no evidence of what BHR actually looked like in the Asian context. BHR work existed in pockets – often country-specific and loosely connected – or operating at the global level, where engagement was less anchored in regional and national realities. There was little precedent for implementing a project that aimed to push the regional BHR agenda – shaping policy, markets and practice across diverse political and economic contexts.  

From there, we began laying the first bricks: linking a handful of countries under one umbrella. That experiment evolved into UNDP’s first regional BHR portfolio, connecting 17 countries around a shared vision of responsible growth and development, and later adapted in other regions.

This first decision set the tone for everything that followed. It meant thinking beyond isolated interventions and toward something more durable: a regional architecture capable of responding to complexity, disagreement, and learning over time. 

First #2: Building Asia’s shared evidence base on BHR

We quickly realized that before we could influence policy or convene platforms, we had to confront a more basic challenge: little shared understanding of what BHR looked like in the Asian context. The UNGPs existed, but how they translated into domestic law, corporate practice or the lives of people in Asia was largely unmapped. 

We started with knowledge – building a regional evidence base through baselines, digital tools, platforms, and shared learning to make BHR visible, legible, and usable in the Asian context. We commissioned a regional study mapping the status of BHR in Asia – the first attempt to capture the region’s governance gaps and opportunities in a single frame. These publications laid the foundations for a shared evidence base, helping the agenda mature from an early experiment into a durable and widely recognized body of work.