States and Firms Co-producing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the Developing World

Abstract

This article examines policy options that are co-produced by both states and firms, with the purpose of regulating an area of public policy and the practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by companies. The contributions of this article are twofold. First, it creates a typology of the co-production of corporate social responsibility, adding “delegated,” “brokered,” and “partnership” as intermediate categories between the natural end points of “voluntary” and “regulated.” Second, it proposes a framework for understanding why governments opt for a particular version of co-produced regulation, by focusing on the interaction between two key variables, the “net enforcement cost” and the “political salience of the demand for regulation.” The framework is tested on examples of the co-production of CSR from Argentina and Peru, where I identify pathways of change from one category of co-production to another.

Are Mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Interventions in India Demand-Driven? The Case of Karnataka

“…Rioux and Vaillancourt (2020) support the argument that CSR private governance schemes should be regulated by national and international laws to make CSR more efficient. A possibility of co-production of policy options by the state and companies for the practice of CSR was explored by Haslam (2020). But Hira (2020) observed a large-scale failure of existing CSR systems in addressing ongoing global environmental and labor standards.…”