Corporate Social Responsibility Strategies in Spanish Electric Cooperatives. Analysis of Stakeholder Engagement

Abstract

Cooperative organizations try to balance economic viability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) management through strategic policies that involve dialogue, participation, and engagement with stakeholders. To measure the impact of CSR management, the electricity sector implements monitoring processes and models, such as the sustainability reporting standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which measure contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda. This research analyses the strategic management of CSR in the 28 electric cooperatives that market electricity in Spain with the aim of determining their level of commitment to CSR and stakeholder participation in their corporate policies. The analysis is based on the descriptive-exploratory study of the whole population of electric cooperatives. The results indicate that the CSR management of most electric cooperatives is still in an emerging stage within the Value Curve. Importantly, there is a significant percentage of cooperatives that have already advanced towards the consolidating and institutionalized stages. However, most of these social-economy organizations are not developing programs that link their CSR strategies with their priority SDGs and sustainability as a commitment to their community.

Corporate Social Responsibility of Financial Cooperatives: A Multi-Level Analysis

“…The resulting strong ties between the directors and the community accords with previous literature, which states that the CSR approach of cooperatives is strongly linked with their communities' expectations [49]. Expanding on the literature, which emphasizes the importance of dialogue, participation, and engagement with stakeholders [32], our results suggest that directors influence CSR strategy through the importance they give to meeting members' needs. Indeed, our results show that in rural areas, with members who have needs directly related to the use of the territory, more proactive strategies are adopted with regard to the environmental dimension than financial cooperatives established in urban areas.…”

“…As social enterprises, cooperatives inevitably pursue both economic and social goals [3,21,22,32]. Consequently, it is reasonable to expect cooperatives to be actively committed to CSR as part of their activities [2,30,[33][34][35].…”

“…The local view of CSR influences how cooperatives and SMEs define their social dimension, focusing their efforts on the local community rather than on society in general. As a result, cooperatives and SMEs attribute greater importance to the social dimension than to the environmental dimension of CSR [5,6,32].…”

Exploring the Status Quo of Adopting the 17 UN SDGs in a Developing Country—Evidence from Vietnam

“…Regarding stakeholders' perspectives, stakeholder engagement is essential for implementing CSR strategies and achieving SDGs [45,64,65]. Stakeholder theory can be used to explain how corporations engage in SDG disclosures.…”

Corporate Social Responsibility and Strategic Management: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are not free from corporate social responsibility, as [10] notes. Previous research found that the majority of social economy businesses have not developed CSR programmes that link to their most key SDGs and sustainability as a social obligation [11].…”