March 3, 2025, by aczht
Dr Lara Bianchi’s research on meaningful stakeholder engagement for marginalised women
Dr Lara Bianchi is an Associate Professor in Business and Society at the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, Nottingham University Business School and is the Departmental Research Director. She is an expert at the RightsLab Beacon of Excellence at the University of Nottingham – the world’s largest group of modern slavery researchers.
A political scientist by training, Lara’s research focuses on workers’ rights in global value chains and meaningful stakeholder engagement with marginalised communities. Her latest research project, funded by Research England Policy Funding, assesses migrant workers’ access to remedy for human rights abuses in the UK agricultural sector. Before this, she led the Global Challenge Research Fund and an ESRC Impact Accelerator Account research project on women’s agency in conflict-affected societies.
In recognition of her work, Lara was nominated for the University of Nottingham’s 2021 Rising Star Award: Public Engagement. This was for developing the Moral Capability Assessment Tool (MCAT) as part of her UoN GCRF-funded project, I Am My Dignity: Women’s Rights in Fragile Contexts (2020-2021). MCAT places women’s voices and agency at the centre of meaningful engagement for sustainable development and peace. Through this online participatory tool, Lara has collaborated with community-based organisations in Pakistan and conflict-affected territories of Mindanao, supporting marginalised indigenous Ata Manobo women and Muslim women in Marawi. To date, she has presented the MCAT toolkit to over 500 expert stakeholders worldwide.
Find out more about Lara’s research:
I am my voice: Meaningful stakeholder engagement with marginalised women
As we celebrate International Women’s Day 2025, it’s important to acknowledge that more than 600 million women worldwide still live in conflict-affected societies. Thirty years after the adoption of the Beijing Declaration on women’s rights, persistent gender inequalities – fuelled by cultural and structural barriers, discriminatory practices, and the feminisation of poverty – continue to define life in these fragile zones.
Despite good intentions, humanitarian agencies, development organisations, and multinational corporations often engage women in stakeholder consultations that are little more than tick-box exercises. These organisations frequently arrive with pre-determined support and decisions made elsewhere, treating women as passive aid recipients rather than active participants in shaping their futures. Gender inequality remains deeply ingrained, with long-standing cultural expectations limiting women’s voices in public and decision-making spaces.
Dr. Bianchi’s recent Global Challenges Research Fund project explored meaningful stakeholder engagement with women from marginalised communities, focusing on Ata Manobo women from the conflict-ridden region of Mindanao, Philippines. This region has endured five decades of intermittent armed conflict, leaving local communities in a constant state of instability. This fragility is exacerbated by deeply ingrained gender inequality, rooted in longstanding traditions and cultural interpretations of gender roles and expectations. Despite the critical role of women in sustaining and nurturing communities during conflicts, women remain sidelined, usually with inconsistent participation in public spaces and a widespread passive acceptance of their voiceless situation.
A critical insight from the research was that women often engage in self-imposed silencing as a coping mechanism. As one participant shared:
“No matter what I say, people still would not hear me or listen to me, that’s why I’d rather not say anything at all.”
Organisations working for or with women – including humanitarian agencies, development actors and multinationals – often inform women of decisions (a policy, a project) that have already been made, rather than genuinely including them in the decision process. One foreign aid representative reflected on this common approach:
“Sometimes when you engage these communities, you don’t know what they’re talking about, so you tell them what they’re talking about – there’s a real danger in the arrogance of aid.”
Despite the growing recognition of stakeholder engagement in business and management, research has largely overlooked marginalised voices and failed to explore what meaningful engagement truly looks like in non-mainstream contexts.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) connects the idea of human dignity to self-determination – the right to have a voice in the decision-making process that determines a person’s life and livelihood. The research project advocates for a relational approach to marginalisation and the adoption of a dialogic model of stakeholder engagement. This means recognising women not just as recipients of aid, but as active agents capable of co-determining their future, even in the most fragile societies.
As we celebrate International Women’s Day 2025, we should commit to moving beyond performative engagement and toward genuine dialogue. We can create sustainable pathways to equality, peace, and development by listening to and empowering marginalised women.
Further information:
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Lara will speak at the British Academy of Management on 7 March alongside Dr Tabitha Sindani (University of Greenwich). Their talk, ‘Putting Hope into Action: Rights, Equality and Empowerment for all Women and Girls,’ will explore feminist hope and how to transform it into action.
Nottingham University Business School – Dr Lara Bianchi profile
Learn more about the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR) at Nottingham University Business School.
If your organisation needs support in designing and implementing stakeholder engagement activities with marginalised groups, please contact Dr Lara Bianchi
If you are an academic interested in understanding the principles of engagement with marginalised stakeholders, please read Lara’s recent article in the Journal of Business Ethics: Engaging Marginalized Stakeholders: Towards a dialogical theorization of effective corporate-rightsholder remedy.
Find out more about the Moral Capability Assessment Tool (MCAT)
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