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Dealing With Uncertainties When Governing CSR Policies

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Abstract

As corporate social responsibility involves a voluntary business endeavour to address social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance, governments cannot fall back on hierarchical command-and-control policies to support it. As such, it is complementary with the increasing popularity of public policies known as New Governance policies, where the government is engaged in a horizontal inter-organizational network of societal actors and where public policy is both formed and executed by the interacting and voluntary efforts from a multitude of stakeholders. However, such policies are known to generate substantive uncertainty about the content of CSR and its related issues, strategic uncertainty regarding the behavior of the actors involved and institutional uncertainty related to the interaction process involved in the institutional change. We explore New Governance policy instruments to address these uncertainties in the context CSR and discuss the experiences with these methods in the European Union.

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Abbreviations

CSR:

corporate social responsibility

EMSF:

European Multistakeholder Forum on CSR

EU:

European Union

GMO:

genetically modified organisms

VA:

voluntary agreement

U.S.:

United States

NGOs:

Non Governmental Organizations

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Acknowledgements

This paper is an adapted version of a paper that was presented at the 11th Sustainable Development Research Conference in Helsinki, Finland. Besides the many valuable comments that we had in the Sustainability Networks research stream session, we would like to thank Bruce Paton, Theo De Bruijn, Erik-Hans Klijn, Frank Nevens, Steven Van Passel, Frieder-Otto Wolf and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights and comments. I would also like to thank the Policy Research Centre for Sustainable Agriculture for providing the opportunities to conduct this research.

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  1. Management and Entrepreneurship, UGent, Hoveniersberg 24, Gent, B-9000, Belgium

    Jan Lepoutre, Nikolay A. Dentchev & Aimé Heene

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  1. Jan Lepoutre
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  2. Nikolay A. Dentchev
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  3. Aimé Heene
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Correspondence to Jan Lepoutre.

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Jan Lepoutre is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics at Ghent University, Belgium. In his dissertation, he focuses on the competences associated with small business social responsibility and networks as governmental means to build competences among small businesses.

Nikolay A. Dentchev is an independent research fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, and a project coordinator at the corporate venturing department of Fortis Group (Fortis Venturing). He holds a Ph.D. in business economics from Ghent University. His current research is related to entrepreneurship, instrumental stakeholder theory, and management challenges of corporate social responsibility.

Aimé Heene is a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Ghent University, Belgium. He teaches strategic management for private and public organizations and currently focuses his research on (competencebased) management in public and social profit organizations.

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Lepoutre, J., Dentchev, N.A. & Heene, A. Dealing With Uncertainties When Governing CSR Policies. J Bus Ethics 73, 391–408 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-006-9214-2

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