Corporate Social Responsibility Across the Globe: Innovative Resolution of Regulatory and Governance Challenges

Description

Corporate Social Responsibility Across the Globe demonstrates many ways that CSR can be applied by law to overcome regulation and governance challenges around the world. Using interdisciplinary and comparative models and perspectives, the book challenges dominant understandings of CSR, such as neoliberal voluntarism, and demonstrates the regulatory and governance implications of an interdependent relationship between CSR and the law. The book identifies substantive and procedural barriers for CSR in national, public, and private international law. By analyzing, deconstructing, and reframing CSR in these contexts, the book underlines opportunities for more effective application of CSR as a governance mechanism. Chapters investigate relevant regulation concepts, paradigms and approaches for CSR; methods for infusing CSR in corporate governance; and ways to facilitate private regulation of CSR in more developed, emerging, and developing jurisdictions.

Onyeka K. Osuji is a Professor of Law and Head of the School of Law, University of Essex, UK. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Social Responsibility Journal and the Advisers' Colleges of Global Principles for Sustainable Securities Lending and Sustainable Finance, the Law and Stakeholders Network. Franklin Nnaemeka Ngwu is an Associate Professor of Strategy, Corporate Governance and Risk Management, and the Director of Lagos Business School (LBS) Sustainability Centre, Pan-Atlantic University He also co-ordinates LBS Public Sector Initiative aimed at promoting more public/private sector partnership for Nigeria's sustainable and inclusive growth and development. He is a member of several bodies including the Nigerian Private Sector Advisory Group (PSAG) on UN Sustainable Development Goals and Expert Network, World Economic Forum. Gary Lynch-Wood is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Regulation at the University of Manchester's Law Department. Gary's research has focused on regulation problems and the challenges of designing effective forms of regulation, particularly in relation to how we can promote corporate social and environmental responsibility. He has published widely on this subject in leading journals (e.g., Journal of Law and Society, Journal of Environmental Law, Journal of Business Ethics, Environmental Politics, Regulation & Governance). His recent book, The Structure of Regulation, provides a general theory for understanding why regulation succeeds and fails. Gary is a member of MANREG, a research group that explores the functioning of regulation across a range of disciplines.

'This collection by Osuji and Ngwu brings new life to some long-standing questions in the area of corporate social responsibility, by placing them in a fresh, new perspective. In particular, this book provides a very welcome addition to the literature in the field, because it proposes innovative conceptual discourses and advances compelling legal and regulatory models for the more effective application of corporate social responsibility, nationally as well as internationally.' Vincenzo Bavoso, Senior Lecturer in Commercial Law, School of Law, University of Manchester, UK 'I admire how the authors have handled this ever topical and evolving subject in an eclectic but effective blend of theory and practice, governance, regulation and political economy discourse. I recommend it to student, academics, managers and policy makers.' Olawale Ajai, Professor of Legal, Social & Political Environment of Business, Lagos Business School, Pan-Atlantic University, Nigeria 'From a combined perspectives of law, economics, and business sciences, Osuji and Ngwu point to creative ways that a mainly firm-based governance orthodoxy can be adapted into a tool for enabling sustainable development in the developing world, where regulations are scarcely enforced. And for this creativity to work, regulators and policy makers in these countries must be open-minded, eclectic, and adventurous in their use of CSR.' Kalu Ojah, Professor of Finance, Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa