Institutional Drivers of Responsible Innovation: The Impact of the UN Global Compact in the Digital Age

Assessing the Impact of Nonprofit Organizations on Multi-Actor Global Governance Initiatives: The Case of the UN Global Compact

“…Such local network activities have been shown to have a significant impact on improving responsible governance in business organizations [36]. However, studies have shown that the learning processes take time, which needs to be considered when assessing individual participants' impact and learning processes [4]. Local networks, therefore, offer a valuable measure to assess NPOs' impact in strengthening the UNGC over time.…”

“…Thus, to gather the relevant data, described activities in the reports from 2011 to 2018 were counted individually for each country and year. Following Schembera's and Hengevoss' approach [4], this study puts equal weight on and adds single activities, including reported conferences, best practices, coaching and thematic sessions, capacity-building activities, workshops, webinars, and similar reported events. In particular, webinars can account for a high number of activities per local network, as they are easily replicable.…”

“…In a global context, the power and capacity of individual states are insufficient to adequately address these challenges [2]. Consequently, other societal actors, including firms and nonprofit organizations (NPOs), are increasingly expected to take on a political role in contributing to systemic change to tackle the root causes of these challenges [3][4][5]. As a result, multi-actor global governance initiatives, such as the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), have emerged to promote and strengthen joint actions to address these challenges [6][7][8].…”

“…Multi-actor global governance initiatives (henceforth multi-actor initiatives) have received considerable attention in the management research literature. However, the research focus is primarily from the business actors' perspective [5], discussing the positive impact of such initiatives on businesses' governance mechanisms [4,[8][9][10] and performance [11,12], while also voicing concerns regarding the initiative's voluntary nature [13,14]. Nonbusiness participants-NPOs in particular-are primarily mentioned as actors with a watchdog function [15,16], or as collaboration partners to strengthen businesses' implementation of the initiatives [17].…”

“…To date, scholarship on the UNGC has taken on a primarily business-focused perspective, providing evidence of the positive impact of the initiative on business governance mechanisms [4,[8][9][10], and performance [11,12]. Concerns have also been voiced regarding the lack of impact on, or "blue washing" of, corporate activities due to their voluntary nature [13,14].…”