The purpose of the SIGMA Guiding Principles is:

	to help organisations understand how they can contribute to sustainable development
	to provide a framework that helps organisations to develop a robust set of guiding principles that they can then follow.

Developing robust principles for your organisation
It is up to individual organisations to select the guiding principles that best fit their values, vision, mission, strategies and operations. These guiding principles should then be communicated to the organisation’s stakeholders and will act as a compass for its journey towards a more sustainable future. This goal should be achieved through well-informed and participative decision-making, improved awareness of acceptable operating parameters and transparency of purpose and direction.

There are a wide range of existing codes of conduct and best practice, business principles and guidelines, from which the SIGMA Guiding Principles have been developed. The SIGMA Guiding Principles seek to build upon a range of existing approaches, whilst remaining compatible with them. For a review of 20 standards and guidelines relevant to sustainable development see ‘SIGMA Guide to Guidelines and Standards relevant to sustainable development’ in the SIGMA Toolkit.

Where an organisation has already adopted or signed up to external codes or has valid principles in place, it can choose to use the SIGMA Guiding Principles to benchmark the coverage, depth and breadth of its existing approaches.

An organisation that achieves alignment with the SIGMA Guiding Principles will be helping to maximise its contribution to sustainable development.

How do the SIGMA Guiding Principles relate to other approaches?

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