Over the past 25 years or so, large corporations have been under increasing pressure both to improve their performance on environment, social and governance (ESG) issues, and to report better on what they have (or haven’t) done. There is now a myriad of guidelines setting both performance standards and reporting requirements, developed by business or other civil society groups, or by private or government market regulators, both nationally and internationally. This unconstrained market-like regulatory process provides little clarity for corporations themselves, or for other stakeholders – workers, consumers, suppliers, financial institutions, market regulators, or governments – who want to evaluate corporates’ performance on, and reporting of, ESG issues.
My project on Corporate regulation to address ESG sustainability focuses on the social and governance dimensions of ESG, looking at the efficacy of different oversight mechanisms to improve corporate performance and reporting. It will examine both public and private regulation nationally and internationally, and also look at corporate collective action, alone or within multi-stakeholder structures. The project starts from my previous work both on individual corporations and on different industrial sectors in a range of countries. It is grounded in the view that shifting corporate strategies and behaviours must go beyond simply re-writing formal rules, frameworks, policies and hierarchies. We must also recognise that corporations are large, heterogenous organisations with distinct corporate cultures and internal informal networks, and that they operate in diverse sectoral and geographical value chains across a range of complex external market and regulatory environments. New strategies and behaviours, and the incentives to induce change towards these, must take account of all of four dimensions: formal rules, informal networks, corporate culture and external environments.
