Corporate Responsibility and Sustainable Development

An Integrative Perspective

Lez Rayman-Bacchus, Philip R Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351391412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Nachhaltige Entwicklung

This book explores the overlapping interests of corporate responsibility and sustainable development, specifically focusing on the dynamics of social change, sustainability governance and evaluation, and creating social value.

Corporate Responsibility and Sustainable Development: An Integrative Perspective draws on ideas and research relevant to both concepts, highlighting the interdependent nature of corporate strategy and policymaker ambition. The authors seek to capture that any evaluation of responsibility for sustainable development demands multiple lenses. They propose an integrative understanding to tackling global challenges around sustainable development and focus on four themes: contextualisation; perspectives on social change; sustainability governance and evaluation; and creating social value. Overall, the book takes an evaluative approach, using these themes as lenses for engaging with global challenges, which encourages reflection and informed action.

Written by two highly experienced authors, this book integrates short case studies and chapter questions throughout the text, in order to reinforce learning and help readers reconcile ideas presented with real world issues. It will be an essential resource for tutors and advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of business, governance and corporate governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability and sustainable development, stakeholder theory, business ethics, and politics.

Part I Contextualisation

1 Introduction

When one considers the concepts of corporate responsibility and sustainable development, they are likely to find that their understanding of each can be different to what others might think. As you will see, we have tried to bring together the varied elements associated with these concepts to assist in providing context that might alleviate the ambiguity that exists. In introducing these various elements, we are also subjecting them to a certain level of critical examination as well as providing the reader with frameworks that have been developed throughout the literature to help us understand how corporate responsibility and sustainable development are connected and representative of socio-economic change that is required if society and our planet are to survive. In this introduction, we provide the reader with insight about the topic, specifically the overlapping perspectives of corporate responsibility and sustainable development. Here we also explain the organisation of the book and provide a brief justification for each of the following overarching learning outcomes expected from reading this text and applying the related insight case studies.

Global challenges facing society

Nearly five years ago, the World Economic Forum identified a number of key challenges facing society around the world.¹ This organisation followed the United Nation’s adoption of a 2030 agenda for sustainable development that outlined 17 related goals required to provide for a more sustainable future for all of humankind. Other global organisations have also addressed the challenges that face humanity. Like the World Economic Forum, they have their own priorities when identifying the challenges. Some focus on issues associated with geopolitical competition,² some specifically address the environment,³ the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a mandate to continually monitor the climate change issue, while others provide more comprehensive identification of global challenges.⁴ These global challenges are listed in Table 1.1, with no specific order of priority. What is obvious is the recognition that these challenges have conflicting solutions. A rising population may be the principal driver of most of these issues, whereas the economic growth of business is primarily driven by increasing levels of consumption, whether that be supplying society’s growing population with products and services or using the human and financial capital required to do so. To what extent then is business responsible for dealing with the challenges arising from that economic growth? Should they voluntarily establish institutional practices that limit income inequality or gender inequality? Or should we rely on government to establish rules and regulations in order to address these challenges? Does the cost of dealing with these challenges prohibit economic growth? Do we need to rethink our model of economic growth? These questions raise the debate on the role of corporations, government, civil society organisations, and the individual in meeting these challenges. Certainly, given the complexity of the issues raised by these questions, the answer is more difficult than just suggesting zero population growth. In the chapters to follow we wish to convey that that there are nuanced perspectives on the challenges society faces; for example, though the projected growth of the world’s population is principally within developing countries, they may follow Europe, Japan, and North America in seeing their population decline as they become more developed. In doing so they may face similar issues as the developed economies with the rising cost of an aging population against a shrinking tax base to support that cost. Yet, developing nations might not even get to that point if they lack the indigenous resources (financial, intellectual, technological etc.) to support getting there. The world may have reached a stage where there is an inability to adequately adapt (in the socio-technical, political-economic, and institutional senses) quickly enough to deal

Table 1.1 Key challenges facing society⁵

Food Security — Rising populations, especially in underdeveloped countries has increased stress on agricultural processes to produce the level of food required to avoid famine.

Peace and Conflict — Countries around the world continue to experience conflict with each other and within themselves around matters such as border disputes and religion.

Income Inequality — Increasing wealth from global economic growth is becoming more inequitable with wealth concentrating among the wealthy.

Biodiversity — Loss of ecosystems from human activity risk is having significant impact not only on the general ecology but also on the world's economies.

Employment and Workplace Standards — Large numbers of people remain unemployed across the globe yet employers are finding it increasingly difficult to find skilled employees with certain jurisdictions and industries continuing to operate with substandard working conditions and low-cost refugee and child labour.

Climate Change — Global warming and the human activity that is contributing to it is having an impact in terms of increasing severity of drought and storm activity, resulting in significant weather-related social and economic loss.

Geopolitical Competition — Countries continue to have competing interests pertaining to the economy, the environment, and society in general.

Global Finance — Inconsistent monetary policies and mistrust of global financial systems by investors has produced inefficient systems of finance that have limited access to credit and savings for billions across the globe.

Internet Use — The technological transformation led by the use of the internet has allowed for a more interconnected world, both for business and personally, but how does the entire world get connected and what will be the impact on data security and personal privacy?

Energy — The need for energy to support economic growth and improved standards of living has encouraged lower cost, environmentally unfriendly sources of energy.

Gender Equality — The gap between men and women in terms of wages, health, education, and political power remains significant and is only slowly being closed even though parity is crucial for the sustainable future of society.

Global Trade and Investment — Increasing exports and foreign direct investment has not been met with the levels of regulatory oversight that limit unethical behaviour and environmental damage.

Transnational Crime — Corruption, bribery, and unethical business practices have resulted as a result of globalisation of the economy, increased numbers and heterogeneity of immigrants, and improved communications technology.

Healthcare — Aging populations have increased the need for a global health system that can deal with global pandemics, rising non-communicable diseases, and the costs of healthcare, particularly in underdeveloped countries.

Long-term Investing — Since the 2008 global economic crisis there has remained a lack of long-term investment by governments and institutions, and with the recent COVID-19 pandemic the pressures faced by governments to address shorter-term issues the combined effect has limited the prospects of longer-term economic growth.

Education — A lack of access to education in developing and underdeveloped countries is limiting the ability for social and environmental progress.

with the convergence of several (predictable) vectors, a situation essentially of our own making: (1) regional population growth and population decline and associated post-industrial social and demographic changes; (2) addiction of natural resource depletion and concomitant institutional structures; (3) the water, food, energy nexus (whose linkages are central to sustainable development); (4) unstoppable industrialisation (in the developing world at least), the potentially unrealistic proposition of de-growth; (5) the consumption-production-waste ‘cycle’; (6) the political and economic inertia (a need to address rising inequality via reining in neoliberalism) and a retreat from multilateralism; and (7) humanity’s contribution to climate change. These vectors are not exhaustive; the recent COVID-19 global pandemic has added another crisis to be faced by society and in its early stages has wreaked havoc on the global economy and healthcare systems, resulting in over a million deaths worldwide. Yet there have been some positive environmental consequences of the pandemic, including the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from reduced travel. This serves to remind us that the crises are interconnected and rely on complex solutions, many of which will require greater levels of corporate responsibility and sustainable development.

The consequences for the world's limited resources of meeting these challenges

Forecasts of population growth have reached anywhere from nine to ten billion people on this planet by the year 2050.⁶ The projected food consumption will require a coordinated approach to addressing existing issues with the way in which society consumes food. The World Resource Institute has identified three specific goals that will contribute to allowing society to address the food security challenge.⁷ Without the success of achieving those goals humanity remains at significant risk from shortages and famine. The single most important goal is to limit volume of food loss and waste produced each year. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), an estimated one third of all food produced globally is lost or goes to waste.⁸ The second goal is to change food consumption behaviour from one that involves excessive amounts of resource-intensive (water, land, fertiliser) foods to one that uses lesser amounts and is replaced with less resource-intensive foods. Finally, food security would benefit from restoring land that has been allowed to degrade to a point that it is no longer efficient for producing food. Of all three goals, the economic conflict that exists is obvious. In developing countries, with a lower-income society, the issue is more about food loss during the production process through not having access to costly, but more efficient, extractive and production processes. In developed economies, with the wealth available t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of insight boxes
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• PART I Contextualisation
• PART II Perspectives on social change
• PART III The sustainability governance trinity
• PART IV Creating social and public value
• Index