Doughnut Economics: Rethinking Human Rights

What if the best way to protect human rights wasn’t adding another compliance layer, but redesigning the enterprise itself? That’s the proposition of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), building on Kate Raworth’s work: every organization is shaped by five layers of design — its purpose, its networks, its governance, its ownership, and its finance. Ksapa, a mission-driven firm that has worked with more than 100 clients since 2019, draws on experts with 25+ years of experience in human rights due diligence and supply chain vigilance. This framework offers a rare lens: it treats human rights not as a risk to be mapped, but as a question of organizational design. Here’s how these five principles build a robust approach.

1. Purpose and Network: Anchoring Human Rights in Why and With Whom a Company Operates

The first design layer DEAL identifies is purpose: a company built to maximize value extraction doesn’t have the same structural relationship to human rights as one built to generate shared benefit. Ksapa has laid out this distinction in a briefing on the key principles for getting corporate vision, mission, and purpose right, which reframes the question from “how much value can this activity extract?” to “how many benefits can it generate, and for whom?” Applied to human rights, this means respect for the dignity of workers, communities, and users can’t remain a secondary goal contingent on quarterly results — it has to be written into the mission itself. Patagonia, whose purpose — “save our home planet” — was locked into its ownership structure, remains the most cited example.

But a stated purpose isn’t enough unless it’s carried through the company’s networks: its suppliers, customers, partners, and sector alliances. This is precisely the terrain where human rights due diligence has taken shape — first under French law in 2017, then at EU scale with the CSDDD directive adopted by the European Parliament, eleven years to the day after the Rana Plaza collapse. A company can have the best human rights policy in the world; if its network of subcontractors sits outside its actual line of sight and influence, protection remains theoretical. Ksapa works with clients on mapping value chains and human rights risk exposure, an exercise that, in Doughnut Economics terms, means redesigning the network around the purpose rather than the reverse.

This purpose/network pairing also determines whether a company treats human rights as a one-off compliance exercise or as a principle shaping its choices on where to operate, whom to source from, and whom to partner with — a distinction well documented in comparative research on European due diligence legislation: the shift from “soft” international norms to binding legal obligations tends to accompany, in the most advanced companies, a genuine change in posture rather than a procedural add-on.

2. Governance and Ownership: Who Decides, and On Whose Behalf

The third design layer — governance — answers a simple but rarely asked question head-on: who is in the room when decisions get made, and which metrics actually drive the trade-offs? As the Systems Change Alliance analysis of Doughnut Economics’ shift from idea to action points out, the incentives given to middle managers — short-term financial returns versus long-term transformative action — shape the fate of human rights inside a company far more than any code of ethics. Several companies have experimented with governance models that widen the circle of stakeholders: British cosmetics maker Faith in Nature gave nature a seat on its board, while Tony’s Chocolonely handed an independent expert committee the power to sound the alarm if the company drifts from its social mission. That’s exactly the logic behind the grievance mechanisms and rightsholder engagement recommended by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: governance that listens to those bearing the impact, not just those producing the report.

Next comes ownership, which Marjorie Kelly — whose work directly informs DEAL’s framework — considers the most determinative layer of all, because it shapes every layer that follows. Who owns the company: a founder, its employees, a founding family, impact-driven investors, or public markets? KPMG notes that recent EU directives (CSRD, CSDDD) are converting what used to be voluntary good practice into mandatory risk management — a shift in status that lands very differently depending on ownership structure. A publicly traded company, under quarterly market pressure, doesn’t have the same room to absorb the cost of remediating an identified violation as a company owned by a foundation or by its own employees. Models such as shared ownership with NGOs or communities (Ecosia, Café Direct) or employee ownership (Eileen Fisher, New Belgium Brewing) show that some capital structures lock in social commitment structurally, rather than leaving it dependent on a single leader’s goodwill.

In our ESG governance advisory work, we consistently find that companies able to sustain their human rights commitments over time are those where governance and ownership were aligned upfront — not those stacking CSR committees on top of an unchanged decision-making structure.

3. Finance: The Deepest Lever, and the Least Visited

The fifth and final layer — finance — is often the most neglected in human rights strategy, even though DEAL considers it the deepest layer of all. How is the company financed, on what terms, and against what return expectations? A DEAL/Centre for Economic Transformation report on regenerative enterprise design makes a simple but rarely applied point: finance should serve the work, not drive it. Yet in human rights due diligence practice, it’s too often the reverse — remediation budgets, community dialogue, and working-conditions improvements are the first line items cut when margins tighten.

That’s why Ksapa has built a growing share of its practice around impact finance and blended finance, which let companies align expected return horizons with the long timeframes real value chain transformation requires — whether in agricultural, forestry, or mining supply chains. A Drawdown Labs webinar with DEAL shows well how rethinking a company’s financing can unlock strategies impossible under a conventional financial model: accepting deferred returns in exchange for measurably lower human rights risk, rather than treating that risk reduction as a pure cost center.

What the five-layer framework reveals is their interdependence. Reworking a company’s ownership structure inevitably reshapes its governance and its financing; genuinely rewriting its purpose almost always requires revisiting its network of partners. Against a European regulatory landscape still consolidating — between CSRD and CSDDD and the standards set by the OSCE and the Council of Europe — the companies that treat human rights as a matter of deep design, rather than a box to check, will be the ones best positioned to absorb the regulatory pressure ahead. That’s the support Ksapa provides: not one more policy, but help redesigning all five layers — purpose, network, governance, ownership, finance — so they converge naturally on respect for human dignity.

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