The Foundation for Business and Sustainable Development was established in 1996 by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) promote the understanding of sustainable development and to encourage education and competence building, research and demonstration projects in the field of sustainable development.

A non-profit institution, it is funded through endowment and matching grants provided on a project basis by corporations, foundations, governments and international organisations.

The Foundation for Business and Sustainable Development (FBSD) changed name on January 1, 2002 to Foundation for Business and Society.

Corporate Governance Project
The Foundation for Business and Society invited in the fall of 2002 fund managers, financial advisors, and certification and rating organizations to explore new ways to promote corporate governance on a global scale. One suggestion was to distil the most important issues linked to governance that could serve as common reference for education and outreach, certifying, screening, and even rating of a company’s corporate governance. The OECD Principles, so it was suggested, would serve as the foundation for such work, cross-references with the governance elements of the Global Reporting Initiative.

The Foundation set therefore up a task force with the mandate to distil the most important elements of all this existing work and highlight what best practice would add, so that new Governance approaches could be operationalised and implemented. The initial drafts were complemented with input from the UK’s Combined Code (that embraced the Cadbury and the Greenbury report), the recommendations of the King Report on Corporate Governance by The Institute of Directors of Southern Africa, and the work done by the ICGN, the ICC, and various governance guidelines of leading institutional investors (like Standards and Poor and Core Rating / Fitch), checked its compatibility with several leading financial institutions and Foundations (like Calpers, Hermes).