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ANNUAL
REVIEWS
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The New Corporate
Social Responsibility
Graeme Auld,1 Steven Bernstein,2
and Benjamin Cashore1
1
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut, 06511; email: graeme.auld@yale.edu, benjamin.cashore@yale.edu
2
Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M5S 3K7, email: steven.bernstein@utoronto.ca
Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2008. 33:413–35
Key Words
First published online as a Review in Advance on
August 1, 2008
codes of conduct, environmental management, environmental
standards, legitimacy, NSMD governance, partnerships
The Annual Review of Environment and Resources
is online at environ.annualreviews.org
This article’s doi:
10.1146/annurev.environ.32.053006.141106
c 2008 by Annual Reviews.
Copyright All rights reserved
1543-5938/08/1121-0413$20.00
Abstract
The last half decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence of attention among practitioners and scholars to understanding the ability of
corporate social responsibility (CSR) to address environmental and social problems. Although significant advances have been made, assessing
the forms, types, and impacts on intended objectives is impeded by the
conflation of distinct phenomena, which has created misunderstandings
about why firms support CSR, and the implications of this support, or
lack thereof, for the potential effectiveness of innovative policy options. As a corrective, we offer seven categories that distinguish efforts
promoting learning and stakeholder engagement from those requiring
direct on-the-ground behavior changes. Better accounting for these
differences is critical for promoting a research agenda that focuses on
the evolutionary nature of CSR innovations, including whether specific
forms are likely to yield marginal or transformative results.
413
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Contents
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1. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2. CONCEPTUAL AND
ANALYTIC CHALLENGES . . . . . .
3. TAXONOMIC CATEGORIES
OF THE NEW CSR . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.1. Individual Firm Endeavors . . . . .
3.2. Firm-NGO Partnerships . . . . . . .
3.3. Public-Private Partnerships . . . .
3.4. Information Approaches . . . . . . .
3.5. Environmental Management
Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.6. Industry Association Codes
of Conduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.7. Nonstate Market-Driven
(Private-Sector Hard Law) . . . . . .
4. WHY FIRMS SUPPORT CSR:
THE BENEFITS OF REFINED
CLASSIFICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. TOWARD AN EVOLUTIONARY
SENSITIVE CSR PROJECT . . . . . .
5.1. The Evolutionary Logic
and the Conundrum . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.2. Phase I: Initiation . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.3. Phase II: Gaining Widespread
Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6. CONCLUSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
414
415
416
417
420
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
428
429
1. INTRODUCTION
In the past 15 years, an array of stakeholders have turned to firms, rather than governments, to address enduring environmental
problems including forest degradation, fisheries depletion, mining destruction, and even
climate change, as well as social problems including workers’ and human rights. As a result, a wide range of tactics, including boycott
campaigns, social and ecolabeling, and environmental certification, have been used to appeal
directly to firms to improve their environmental management procedures and performance
as well as their treatment of workers and the
impacts of their activities in the communities
in which they operate. These efforts to pro414
Auld
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mote what is generally known as corporate social responsibility (CSR) (1) have increasingly
attracted the interest of a wide range of scholars within political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, and geography.
Several factors have coincided to explain this
renewed interest in CSR among both practitioners and scholars. These include the ineffectiveness, to date, of many governmental
and intergovernmental processes (2), accelerating economic globalization, which has placed
special attention on transnational or global
firms (3), and general interest in pursuing innovative “smart regulation” (4) that, supporters
argue, would encourage entrepreneurial innovation (5, 6).
Does CSR have the potential to address enduring environmental and social problems? We
argue that the greatest challenge for CSR scholarship in answering this question is the conflation of very different phenomena under the
rubric of CSR (7). To further advance our understanding of the possibilities and limits of
CSR to transform market behavior and ultimately be a significant force for social and environmental change, we must more precisely define the particular phenomenon being assessed.
The general failure to define and delineate types
of CSR has led to misunderstandings surrounding why firms support it, and the implications
of this support, or lack thereof, for the potential
of innovative policy mechanisms to be effective
where government policy has been inadequate
or absent. Furthermore, this gap has significantly limited the ability to address arguably the
most important question facing CSR scholarship: whether and how CSR innovations might
evolve to become enduring and meaningful arenas for the promotion of environmentally and
socially responsible behavior?
We advance this argument in four analytic steps. First, we review key definitional
and conceptual challenges facing research on
CSR. We delineate different phenomena that
fall under the CSR label and the different expectations practitioners and scholars have regarding such efforts. In particular, we review
scholarly assessments of whether these efforts
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promote learning and stakeholder engagement,
which may have indirect impacts on behavioral change, or directly require specific on-theground behaviors. Second, drawing on these
distinctions, we identify taxonomic categories
under which scholars can place their particular research projects. A third section justifies
why we ought to be sensitive to these differences, especially because particular CSR programs can change over time—moving from one
taxonomic category to another. A fourth section reviews the conceptual, methodological,
and theoretical challenges in understanding and
researching such an evolution.
We conclude by assessing what our review
means for the next generation of CSR, and the
potential of CSR to become an effective tool
within domestic and global environmental and
social governance. We are interested not only
in what CSR initiatives have done, but also their
transformative potential in the global marketplace. In other words, the next stage for CSR
research is to shift from a debate on whether
CSR makes a difference in particular cases to
whether, and what types of, CSR hold promise
as alternative forms of environmental and social
regulation.
2. CONCEPTUAL AND
ANALYTIC CHALLENGES
Any effort to assess the burgeoning interest in
CSR should begin with two important conceptual distinctions: between the old and new CSR
and between win-win and win-lose CSR efforts.
On the first distinction, Vogel (1) notes that, although CSR efforts have significant historical
roots, older efforts largely focused on corporate philanthropic activities that usually had little to do with the firm’s core business practices.
These efforts were spurred particularly in the
United States by favorable tax laws and remain
important in American life. They have led to
the creation of the Carnegie libraries and socially and environmentally active foundations,
including those of the Ford and Rockefeller
Brothers, and, more recently, Bill and Melinda
Gates’ foundation, whose charitable contribu-
tions have nothing to do with addressing any
environmental or social challenges within the
software and computing industries.
In contrast, the new CSR is squarely focused
on internalizing a firm’s negative externalities. Instead of explicitly or implicitly diverting
attention from an environmental or social concern arising from a firm’s core business activity, the new CSR occurs when firm officials
address such issues directly. Hence, corporate
image builders applying the new CSR seek to
show that their firm is actively promoting social
and environmental standards that regulate or
alter their core practices, often in an attempt to
show they are ahead of their competitors. Supporters argue that such dynamics, if successful,
can lead to a “race to the top” as firms compete
for the title of being the most environmentally
and socially responsible.
The second analytic distinction—between
situations in which CSR is win-win or winlose from the firm’s perspective—arises because
the new CSR imposes social and environmental requirements/burdens on profit-maximizing
firms. In win-win situations, solutions are available internally, where improvements in practices are also profitable. In win-lose cases, however, immediately available internal solutions
are unprofitable or otherwise harmful to the
firm’s survival or success in the marketplace.
Win-lose situations therefore require the creation of some external economic benefit or
change in the competitive environment to offset the environmental and social costs of new
or altered practices. If neither profitable internal changes nor external economic benefits are
available, a profit-maximizing firm undertaking
the new CSR will, over time, either suffer comparative disadvantage vis-à-vis nonparticipating
firms by losing money, or the self imposed requirements will be marginal rather than transformative.
Many of today’s examples, heralded by
firms and advocates, fit under the immediate
win-win category. For instance, one explanation for the plethora of firms now engaged
in voluntary greenhouse gas emissions reductions is that they will realize, if successful,
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economic gains and provide environmental
benefits. Firms often attempt to unlock, or advocate, these win-win scenarios in two ways.
First, they may collaborate with environmental organizations or champion multistakeholder
learning dialogues to assist them in their efforts.
Such approaches can save firms’ time and resources, as the nongovernmental organization
(NGO) provides what otherwise would have
imposed internal cost. Their purpose, in these
cases, is to uncover new business practices as
well as build trust among potential critics of
the firm’s intentions or commitment. Second,
firms seek and apply advances in new technological innovations (6).
Predictably, fewer examples of win-lose
cases are available because purposeful internal
behavioral change, in the long run, requires
some type of countervailing economic benefit
(whether abstract or direct) to justify cost impositions. Profit-maximizing behavior, and the
interests of shareholders, mandates that firms
avoid a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis their
competitors. No amount of good will or leadership can change this logic (8). Although successful CSR efforts in these win-lose situations
are, understandably, more limited than other
forms of CSR, we argue that they deserve the
most sustained attention because if they emerge
as enduring and purposeful features of the marketplace they hold the greatest transformative
potential.
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3. TAXONOMIC CATEGORIES
OF THE NEW CSR
We focus our review on the new CSR because its
goal is to direct and require particular environmentally and socially responsible behavior—an
activity that until recently was something in the
ambit of governments. As Andrews (9) argues,
and as most working on CSR agree (10–15),
the burden of proof on CSR advocates is “to
demonstrate how their proposals will in fact
achieve equal or better results than government
regulations” (9, p. 179). To shed light on differences among CSR initiatives in pursuing these
goals, we identify seven categories of initiatives
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and the logic of change underlying each. We
pay particular attention to whether their immediate and long-term aims are to encourage
broad-based stakeholder learning and/or direct
prescriptive behavior on the ground. Following
that discussion, we assess the potential transformative capacity of these different categories of
CSR in win-lose situations.
Our classification and evolutionary emphasis departs from Baron’s (16) approach in that,
by definition, CSR must go beyond market demands, and also from much of the remaining literature’s baseline that to count as CSR, it must
promote behavior beyond compliance with
existing laws (8; 11, p. 108; 17–19).
Although there is an elegance and tractability to these approaches, we employ an alternative for three reasons. First, limiting CSR
to only those innovations that do not produce
market demands eliminates some of the most
important and innovative efforts to promote
stewardship through the marketplace. Second,
if we focused solely on beyond-compliance
initiatives, because governments often change
their rules, a firm could lose its CSR status even
if it did not change any internal commitments.
Similarly, if a large firm operates in different
political jurisdictions, a corporate environmental strategy may be at once beyond compliance
in some jurisdictions but below compliance in
others. In these cases, the same strategy would
be simultaneously classified as both an example
of CSR and not CSR. Third, it is, as we show
below, a conceptual mistake to equate an incompliance firm, which undertakes a beyond compliance CSR strategy solely as a means to reduce
the threat of impending governmental regulations, with a firm which undertakes a CSR
strategy because it wants to find a way to address an environmental or social challenge. To
be sure, both strategies could lead to important
changes in policies, yet their underlying motivations could reveal quite distinct reasons for
support and therefore longer-term prospects of
transformation (20, p. 325; 21).
Although a static definition may be easy to
operationalize, it can limit understanding of dynamic change within firms, the interaction of
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CSR choices with the broader public policy
arena and organizational fields (see, e.g., 22),
and the motivations for support. These factors
are the most important for understanding the
sources of behavioral change/commitment and
whether and how the CSR innovation might
lead to direct change or to learning that ultimately is influential through other policy innovations and/or governmental processes.
Our classification, rooted in the above distinctions, discerns seven ideal types of CSR
innovations: individual firm efforts; individual
firm and individual NGO agreements; publicprivate partnerships; information-based approaches; environmental management systems
(EMSs); industry association corporate codes of
conduct, and private-sector hard law known as
nonstate market-driven (NSMD) governance.
Their delineation is useful, as Table 1 reveals,
in identifying differences in origins, internal
compliance incentives, interactions with statecentered authority, internal governance mechanisms, policy approach/scope, and enforcement mechanisms. We develop these seven
categories as ideal types and recognize that not
all examples fit easily into a category. Nonetheless, we argue that disentangling these differences is critical to addressing questions about
effectiveness—the ultimate concern of most
analyses—including what firm support means
for direct impacts (both short- and long-term)
and longer-term transformation via learning
across stakeholders.
3.1. Individual Firm Endeavors
Individual firm endeavors are the most common and widely studied form of the new CSR,
which focuses on strategies of individual firms
to undertake environmentally and socially responsible behavior. Scores of practitioner conferences have been devoted to understanding
the business case for CSR and the positive economic impacts that can accrue to such firms.
Similarly, researchers invest great effort to assess the links between CSR initiatives and financial performance (23). Scholarly journals are replete with work detailing the origins, ongoing
development, and success or failure in a broader
sense of internal CSR initiatives at major multinational firms, including Wal-Mart (24), Chiquita Brands International (25), Ikea (26), Nike
(27), food retailers in general (28, 29), and specific ones such as Unilever (30), among others (31, 32). Providing environmental or sustainability reports (33), supporting ecolabeling,
promoting health and safety for employees, and
ensuring fair working conditions in the factories that produce their products comprise some
of the efforts firms employ.
A second, less-examined aspect of firm CSR
initiatives concerns those proactive efforts to
uncover and pursue win-win solutions or turn
what appear to be win-loss situations in the
short term into longer-term win-win situations.
That is, some firms have, as Esty & Winston
(6) reveal, been proactive in developing new
green and socially responsible markets that, by
their very nature, embed a stewardship ethic
(34). These include Toyota’s proactive decision
to gamble on creating fuel-efficient and green
hybrid cars, which stands in contrast to Ford’s
ultimately uneconomic decision to focus on the
declining SUV market. Similarly, GE’s decision to promote wind and solar technology is
an effort to change the very market demand
upon which it depends. Although such technological innovations are not considered CSR
by some (16), we see this as a mistake because,
arguably, any effort to find or create win-win solutions will have far greater and enduring impacts than abstract, and unenforceable, commitments to costly behavioral changes. A search
for these technological win-win activities could
mitigate, for example, suboptimal technologies
(35).
In general, then, firm level innovations, by
relying on internal firm decisions, are characterized (Table 1) by the absence of direct
governmental requirements on policy-making
processes internal to the firm, although the
shadow of the state is never completely absent.
Compliance incentives tend to accrue abstractly
from the firm’s interest in developing a social license to operate (34, 36), from green markets
(34, 37) or technological advances that reduce
www.annualreviews.org • The New Corporate Social Responsibility
Environmental
management system
(EMS): a structured
framework of
procedures to
implement and achieve
a company’s
environmental
performance targets
and goals
Nonstate marketdriven (NSMD)
governance: a special
case of private
governance where
states do not implicitly
or explicitly provide
compliance incentives
417
418
Auld
All state-based
authority and
intergovernmental
agreements
The state
The state
Central
Who
creates the
rules?
Compliance
incentives
Role of
state
Government
traditional
Traditional
·
Bernstein
·
Cashore
Variable
Can require or
encourage
State(s)
(sometimes
require)
Markets (public
shaming)
State does not
use its
sovereign
authority to
directly require
adherence to
rules
Transnational
supply chain
Members of the
certification
body
Usually
environmental,
social and
business
interests
Forest
Stewardship
Council,
Marine
Stewardship
Council,
Fairtrade
Labelling
Organizations
International
State(s) delegate
and/or share
State(s), either
explicitly or
implicitly
Agreed upon by
participating
governmental
and nongovernmental
actors
EPA star
preferred
treatment
U.S. voluntary
standards
program (state
in background)
Global Compact
Public/private
partnerships
In background
Helps facilitate
intergovernmental
agreements
Public image
Win-win learning
Private bodies
Range of
stakeholders but
industry dominated
Implicit links to
intergovernmental
efforts, such as
World Trade
Organization
Often in shadows
Benefits in
membership and
public image
The trade
association
Responsible Care,
Equator Principles,
American Forest
and Paper
Association’s
Sustainable
Forestry Initiative,
Australian Forestry
Standard
of conduct
systems
International
Organisation for
Standardization
(ISO),
ecomanagement
and audit scheme
Industry
associations codes
Environmental
management
The new corporate social responsibility
Often in shadows
Scrutiny of firm
activities by public,
stakeholders, and
shareholders
The firm
Thousands of
examples:
Starbucks CAFÉ
standards,
McDonald’s
sustainability
Individual firms
16 September 2008
Government,
industry,
and/or other
stakeholders
Global
Reporting
Initiative
Information
approaches
Nonstate
market driven
(private sector
hard law)
Distinguishing the new corporate social responsibility
ARI
Examples
Table 1
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Courts, police
Wide ranging
Historically
focused on
command and
control
Policy
Approach
Moral suasion
None
Variable
Prescriptive
Compliance
must be
verified
Institutionalized
procedures for
ongoing policy
participation
from diverse
societal and
stakeholder
groups
Consensual
Scope can be
wide ranging
Varies, often
turn first to
voluntary
approaches
Ranges from
closed
communities to
wide ranging
stakeholder
participation
Focuses on
management
systems
Does not contain
on-the-ground
requirements
Usually third party
certification of
broad principles
Variable including
business-dominated
and/or
multistakeholder
approaches
Emphasizes broad
goals
Flexible approach
Fewer
on-the-ground
requirements
Association
oversight varies
Tends not to be as
extensive
Limited to members
of regulated group
Varies
Internal
Often relies on
self-declarations
Internal to the firm
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Enforcement
Varies across
states
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Governance
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costs and enhance profits (34), or from a desire
to have a first-mover advantage (38).
In this CSR category, then, there are no externally imposed prescriptive requirements to
which a firm must adhere, and the firm controls
the processes and policies it develops. However, because these efforts almost always involve interacting with stakeholders, we would
expect such an approach to promote learning
and to offer the potential to uncover win-win
solutions.
3.2. Firm-NGO Partnerships
In this category, firms initiate, or are involved
in, partnerships with other stakeholders. Partnerships come generally in two forms: (a) ones
in which they partner with environmental or
social groups to address environmental or social issues associated with their operations (39,
40), which is the focus of this discussion;
or (b) a public-private partnership in which
firms, governments, and NGOs all interact toward some common goal, which we categorize separately in section 3.3. Environmental
Defense and Conservation International, and
are prominent U.S. examples of organizations
that have partnered with companies such as
McDonalds, Starbucks, and FedEx, among
others (41, 42). The World Wide Fund for
Nature (WWF) is also a frequent partnering
NGO that has worked with Unilever (43) and
Domtar (44), for instance, and has developed,
in the forestry sector, partnership arrangements
with hundreds of forestry product buyers and
suppliers in more than 30 countries that aim to
encourage shifts to the supply and demand of
sustainable forest products (45).
Such partnerships can be important for both
unlocking indirect learning processes and promoting direct specific requirements. There is
little question that when NGOs and firms discuss issues they almost always uncover misunderstandings about how things work, which led
NGOs to champion a course of action that
might not have had the effects they were seeking. Such partnerships can also create outside
benefits, albeit abstract, because the public is
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Cashore
more likely to accept a project with NGO participation than one in which firms act alone (46,
47). We expect perceptions of this outside benefit to largely determine the size and nature of
the steps firms can undertake.
3.3. Public-Private Partnerships
In contrast to private-private collaborations between firms and a counterpart NGO, publicprivate partnerships involve firms as part of
a broader community of interests in which
government, business, environmental, and social stakeholders interact around solving a
given problem (48). Partnerships come in
many forms. They can involve coordination to
address rule or standard setting, implementation, or service provision, where the relationship (from the state’s perspective) can be classified as co-optation, delegation, coregulation, or
self-regulation in the shadow of hierarchy (49).
Co-optation involves state consultation with
private actors. Delegation occurs when states or
intergovernmental organizations give private
actors responsibilities over governance functions. Coregulation involves true joint decisionmaking between the state and private actors.
Finally, self-regulation in the shadow of a hierarchy captures cases where private actors selfregulate to avoid or reduce threats of state
intervention (49).
Public-private partnerships also exist at the
local, national, and international levels (49–
51). They can include efforts, organized by
a municipality and local companies, to provide clean water to impoverished communities (52) or provide AIDS-stricken communities
with access to drugs, as in the case of the UN
HIV/AIDS effort (53, 54). In this latter example, the United Nations, through the Global
Health Initiative, provides an arena and some
resources for engaging drug companies in an effort to bring impoverished communities health
care treatments that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive and out of reach.
At the domestic level, a prominent example
is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s
(EPA’s) effort to give incentives to green firms
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in the form of reduced regulatory oversight
through such programs as the Common Sense
Initiative and Project XL (19, 55–57). Here, the
focus is on developing a more efficient means
for enforcing costly legislation (19, 58). In other
cases, programs can explicitly eschew regulatory relief. The 33/50 Program, initiated by
the EPA in 1992 to reduce releases of 17 key
toxic substances by 33% by 1993 and 50% by
1995, was structured without provisions for relaxed regulatory oversight (59). Another example is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Climate Challenge Program, initiated in 1994 to
encourage electric utilities to reduce or offset
greenhouse gas emissions (55). Indeed, on the
basis of a review of 60 extant U.S. public voluntary programs, Lyon & Maxwell (14) uncover
that few offer explicit regulatory relief. Instead,
the majority aim to disseminate information
on best practices or technologies and to give
companies public recognition of their beyondcompliance behavior. In these cases, which were
initiated under the Clinton administration (60)
but have since been further favored under the
George W. Bush administration, the state is directly involved in providing firms the option of
pursuing such efforts, with the implicit knowledge that refusal by firms to participate will
create pressure on the state to pursue a more
traditional command and control or regulatory
approach (61).
In all of these cases, the state is directly or
indirectly involved, either as facilitator or financial provider, but never as the sole decision
maker. Instead, stakeholders participate in joint
decision making, with a focus on problem alleviation and the alignment of strategic interests.
The type of problem addressed varies widely.
Hence, the AIDS example is focused on saving lives, whereas the UN Global Compact,
which brings together firms who agree to promote its principles for global corporate behavior, is more abstract and emphasizes norms of
corporate responsibility (62, 63). Although diverse, we would expect public-private partnerships to be effective when they explicitly draw
on state authority to require behavior and/or
lead to innovative approaches that the firm, by
itself, could not have uncovered and/or implemented on its own.
3.4. Information Approaches
Another important feature of many CSR efforts
focuses on the provision of information related
to a firm’s behavior. Information-suppression
and -disclosure policies and voluntary labeling
programs are means by which governments encourage behavioral change through the control
of information (64). The EPA, for instance, created the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) as a
provision of the 1986 Emergency Planning and
Community Right-to-Know Act, which mandated public access to information on release
levels for hundreds of toxic substances emitted
by U.S. industrial facilities (65). Later, in 1991,
as discussed above, it launched the 33/50 Program as a voluntary beyond-compliance program intended to expedite emission reductions
of certain TRI toxins (8, 66, 67). More recently,
certain U.S. states made it mandatory for power
utilities to disclose environmental information
on marketing as well as product-sales information for utility customers (68), and amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act required
water suppliers to disclose information on contaminants (65). Again, Lyon & Maxwell’s work
(14) illustrates the prevalence of information
approaches in the suite of recent U.S. public
voluntary programs. Outside the United States,
information policies have also grown in popularity. The German ecolabel was first introduced in 1978, followed by similar programs in
the Netherlands, Austria, France, and the EU
as a whole (61, 69). Canada, Australia, and the
EU have also adopted information-disclosure
requirements on toxics similar to those of the
U.S. TRI (70).
Information approaches carry their own
logic of effectiveness. The idea behind them
is that, by making environmental performance
more transparent (and hence shaming or rewarding through abstract public consternation
or support), an economic logic exists, which
may shift behavior by eliminating the most
detrimental practices, products, or by-products
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Eco-Management
and Audit Scheme
(EMAS): a European
Union program to
reward and recognize
companies that go
beyond minimum legal
compliance and
continuously improve
their environmental
performance
ISO: International
Organization for
Standardization
0:0
of production in favor of more benign ones.
They can also lead to learning among stakeholders about corporate practices, facilitating
decisions on the basis of more scientific understandings than (often incorrect) perceptions. As
Rosenau (51, p. 12) notes, virtually all of them
involve “close collaboration and the combination of the strengths of both the private sector
(more competitive and efficient) and the public
sector (responsibility and accountability vis-àvis society).”
Underlying this emphasis on transparency,
rather than prescriptive requirements, is the hypothesis that global firms will be shamed into
doing the right thing, or they will risk losing markets if they fail to act. Governments
belonging to the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) have
adopted this approach (61, 69, 70), but it also exists transnationally in a CSR/voluntary format
through the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
(71, 72). Firms, participating in the GRI, voluntarily report the environmental and social impacts of their activities. In these cases, the intergovernmental system is also in the shadows,
but the reporting rules are developed by stakeholder members of the GRI, with considerable
discretion given to individual firms. Currently,
compliance mechanisms tend to be tied to the
size of the firm, i.e., larger firms can be more
easily shamed or targeted, whereas smaller
firms are often shielded from such scrutiny.
3.5. Environmental Management
Systems
A fifth category is the adoption of externally imposed criteria about how to manage a firm’s internal approaches to environmental and social
stewardship. This form of CSR allows firms to
decide which behaviors they will adopt and focus on the win-win benefits that accrue from
learning about how to develop their EMSs.
Firms that adopt an EMS also may expect to
gain the indirect benefit of the positive image that might accrue from society. The two
most prominent examples of EMSs are Europe’s
Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS)
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and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001 procedures for environmental management (18, 73). Industry and
state delegates have historically negotiated ISO
standards while incrementally increasing access
to a range of other stakeholders (74). ISO is
formally an NGO and provides certification of
firms for development of internal processes. Although it does provide for third-party certification, and hence is distinct from self-initiated
processes delineated above, its focus on systems,
rather than behavioral on-the-ground requirements, provides a more complex picture as to
whether support is an example of a firm being proactive or is attempting to gain cover
from more prescriptive (and costly) requirements. ISO’s EMSs have been commonly and
improperly confused with private-sector hard
law systems. Even though firms are audited for
following their own EMSs, ISO does not require any particular on-the-ground changes. It
requires only continual improvement from the
baseline of the company’s own specified targets.
We also note that the increasing interest in
CSR has now led ISO to develop a standard for
social responsibility (to be published in 2008 as
ISO 26000). This includes multistakeholder input, but unlike other ISO standards, it will have
no procedural or on-the-ground requirements
(only voluntary guidelines), and there will be no
procedure for pursuing third-party certification
(75, 76).
EMSs have been strongly promoted because they often lead to learning among officials
within a firm. That is, an EMS often leads to
the identification of obsolete or inefficient practices that might simultaneously improve the
bottom line and environmental performance.
In addition, to the extent that goodwill is created, there may be an additional outside benefit that would permit the firm to implement
internal costs consistent with the outside benefit. At the same time, we expect that confusion
between EMS procedural requirements and the
hard law systems below may actually lead to less
effectiveness. That is, scholarship must carefully assess whether EMSs are used as a way
to avoid specific behavioral requirements to
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address an environmental problem or to obscure what are actually limited efforts. This
means that correlational statistical analyses that
focus on adoption of standards, by themselves,
are insufficient. They must exist alongside indepth historical case studies that place attention
not only on firm adherence to particular policies but also to the behavioral requirements that
follow from such a course of action.
3.6. Industry Association Codes
of Conduct
Attempts by industry associations to establish
industry-wide codes of conduct to which its
members commit to adhere fall under this category (77–80). Examples include the chemical
industry’s voluntary Responsible Care Program
(4, pp. 137–266, 81), the Sustainable Forestry
Initiative in the United States and Canada
(82), the recent Cement Sustainability Initiative supported by the World Business Council
for Sustainable Development, and a code for
responsible fisheries practices supported by the
US-based Responsible Fisheries Society (83,
84), among others (see 61, 80).
Unlike the firm-level activities described
above, industry-wide initiatives build collective efforts to improve CSR practices across
firms. Hence, they contend with interfirm as
well as intrafirm politics. Many studies examine these politics to understand the origins of
codes across sectors and generally find them
emerging in industries where companies hold
collective reputations (a bad image of the industry impacts all companies, regardless of their
individual performance) (81, 85) and sell primary or intermediary goods, not end-consumer
goods (4, p. 161; 86; 87). More recently, however, industry-wide initiatives have formed that
contradict this pattern. The Common Code for
the Coffee Community, for instance, serves as
a baseline standard for social and environmental practices in coffee production, trade, and
roasting, and it has enlisted many of the world’s
largest coffee roasters (88–90). Recent work by
King (91) proposes explanations for these patterns on the basis of transaction cost theory, but
it remains to be explained why sector-wide initiatives pervade certain sectors and not others.
Movement toward Responsible Care, one of
the first industry codes, began in the late 1970s
within the Canadian Chemical Producer Association. Focusing events, including the Love
Canal and Union Carbide’s Bhopal disaster,
served by 1984 to transform a policy statement to a condition of membership, an effort by
Canadian producers to deflect threats of government intervention (92). This program includes no formal role for social or environmental groups. Although industry association programs are a step beyond firm-level CSR initiatives, those that leave control to their business members and do not engage outside stakeholders are distinct from full-fledged thirdparty standard setting. In particular, industrydominated initiatives do not create an adaptive
governance arena that mediates among divergent viewpoints or otherwise mitigates power
struggles.
The Equator Principles represent another emerging example of a principle-setting
exercise. These principles provide the banking industry with a “framework for addressing environmental and social risks in project
financing” (93). Firms sign onto the principles
voluntarily and signal their support through
self-declarations (94, pp. 121–44; 95).
Some codes of conduct are less easily classified, especially those that include governments
in the formulation of rules and therefore have
some characteristics of public-private partnerships. We place them in this category nonetheless because their operational features and voluntary character make them analytically similar
to industry association codes. For example, the
OECD’s Guidelines for International Investment and Multinational Enterprises (revised in
2000) encourages a wide range of good practices and establishes National Contact Points
to promote them, but the standards are voluntary even for those firms that sign on (96,
97). The most prominent sustainability information mechanism, the Global Reporting Initiative, although neither an industry association
nor public-private partnership, fits the same
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FSC: Forest
Stewardship Council
0:0
pattern (98). Highly touted as a mechanism to
operationalize transparency and accountability
for initiatives such as the OECD guidelines and
Global Compact, it simply provides guidelines
for organizations to report their pollution levels
and other sustainability measures.
Hence, codes of conduct can be important
forces for unleashing learning across stakeholders and for engaging with the public and organized interests about their stewardship. They
are, however, not the place to identify and produce specific behavioral requirements to which
firms must adhere, nor adaptive arenas for multistakeholder decision making.
3.7. Nonstate Market-Driven
(Private-Sector Hard Law)
This unique type of CSR institution differs fundamentally from the above efforts because it is
about creating enduring and prescriptive hard
law (i.e., it sets mandatory behavioral requirements to which firms must adhere) in the private
sector. Although legal theory, and especially international legal theory, might find this characterization oxymoronic because nonstate forms
of governance are defined as soft law rather
than hard law (99), we use the term because
this form of CSR creates obligations and rests
on a sense of legitimacy more akin to public
hard law than declaratory or private soft law
(which sets abstract goals to which firms and
other actors are encouraged to comply). Elsewhere, Cashore (100), Cashore et al. (101) and
Bernstein & Cashore (102), labeled this phenomenon NSMD on the basis of their work
on forest certification and the proliferation of
other third-party certification systems that have
emerged over the past 15 years.
Five key features distinguish NSMD governance from other forms of public and private authority reviewed above. The most important feature of NSMD governance is that,
in general, the state does not provide implicit,
or explicit, compliance incentives. Rather, a private organization develops rules designed for
achieving preestablished objectives (sustainable
forestry, in the case of forest certification). A
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second feature is that its institutions constitute
governing arenas in which adaptation, inclusion, and learning occurs over time and across
diverse stakeholders. The founders of NSMD
approaches, including forest certification, justify this governance structure because they are
more democratic, open, and transparent than
the client-oriented public policy networks (i.e.,
where public authorities have a close relationship to clients in the private sector that they
govern) they seek to replace.
A third key feature is that these systems govern within a reconstituted “global public domain” (62), in which, as Ruggie describes it,
states are “embedded in a broader, albeit still
thin and partial, institutionalized arena concerned with the production of global public
goods” (62, p. 500). Seeing the global public
domain as no longer only the purview of states
supports our position that these attempts to
govern the private sector largely independent
of state authority can still be viewed as hard
law. To achieve global public goods, these systems require profit-maximizing firms to undertake potentially costly reforms, which they otherwise would not pursue, for the potential of
longer-term collective (and possibly individual)
benefits. This distinguishes NSMD systems
from other arenas of private authority, such as
business coordination over technological developments (the original reason for the creation
of the ISO), that can be explained by profitseeking behavior and through which reduction
of business costs is the ultimate objective.
The fourth key feature is that authority
is granted through the market’s supply chain.
In the case of forest certification, the global
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which has
widespread support from many of the world’s
leading environmental groups, and FSC competitors, initiated by forest owners and industry associations, promote and champion their
versions of sustainable forest management by
focusing on forest products’ customers. They
attempt to convince consumers and producers
along the supply chain to support and demand
that their supplies come from certified forests
(103; 104, pp. 42, 43; 105; 106). Landowners
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may respond to incentives, such as product price
premium or increased market access, whereas
environmental organizations may act through
boycotts and other direct action initiatives.
These forces convince large retailers, such as
B&Q and Home Depot, to adopt purchasing
policies favoring the FSC, thus placing more
direct economic pressure on forest managers
and landowners.
The fifth key feature of NSMD governance
is the existence of verification procedures designed to ensure that the regulated entity actually meets the stated standards. Verification
is important because it provides the validation
necessary for certification programs to achieve
legitimacy, as certified products are then demanded and consumed along the market’s supply chain. This distinguishes NSMD systems
from many other forms of CSR, noted above,
that require limited or no outside monitoring
(4, pp. 137–266).
Buoyed by the forestry example, certification systems have proliferated in other sectors. These include the Fairtrade Labelling
Organizations International, which, as of 1997,
coordinated under one system national fair
trade labeling initiatives that were all, in their
respective national markets, aiming to ameliorate the conditions of poor and marginalized producers in the developing world by improving the terms of trade for their products.
Fair trade now covers a diverse range of internationally traded commodities and specialized goods including coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar,
bananas, rice, fresh fruit, juice, honey, vanilla,
nuts and oilseeds, cotton, sports balls, flowers,
and wine (107). Similarly, Social Accountability
International, initiated by the nonprofit Council on Economic Priorities to reduce sweatshop labor practices, developed into a system
that monitors individual companies according
to specified social criteria, including child labor and worker safety (108–111). The FSC
model explicitly inspired the Marine Stewardship Council governing wild-capture fisheries management (112) and the Sustainable
Tourism Stewardship Council, among others
(113). Emergent umbrella systems include the
International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labeling Alliance, which was
created to develop agreement on best practices
for any certification system (114, 115). The
NSMD system is the category of CSR that most
directly requires specific courses of action, but
also simultaneously engages a variety of firms,
NGOs, and other stakeholders in a range of
learning efforts. Thus, NSMD deserves more
sustained focus and assessment of its short-,
medium-, and long-term potential to transform
markets and, ultimately, effectively address environmental and social problems.
4. WHY FIRMS SUPPORT CSR:
THE BENEFITS OF REFINED
CLASSIFICATION
The need for a more refined classification of
CSR initiatives is borne out by the research
on its effects. A core finding is that both the
type of initiative and the context in which firms
are motivated to support CSR play significant
roles in determining the strength and kind of
effects CSR has. For example, researchers applying both large-N studies (85, 116) and case
research (117) find that when specific environmental standards, third-party oversight, and
sanctions are absent, firm support does not tend
to equate with on-the-ground changes in practices. For example, in an early examination of
Responsible Care, King & Lenox (85) found
no aggregate evidence that the program led
members to accelerate their pollution reduction relative to nonmembers. Indeed, the opposite occurred; nonmembers improved faster
than members. Even where third-party oversight is present, as is the case with ISO 14001,
Potoski & Prakash (118) found that facilities
with a moderate level of regulatory compliance,
measured against their peers, were most likely
to participate. Those with low or high levels of
compliance were less likely to join. However,
those that joined did improve their environmental performance, a result in contrast to King
& Lenox’s (85) findings noted above. Additional
analysis of design features of industry codes
of conduct emphasize that small or federated
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systems are better tooled to ensure effective
compliance (119), particularly because small
groups are better able to monitor and sanction
members.
Forces, or institutional pressures, outside a
given initiative are also important determinants
of effectiveness. Pressure from stakeholders and
threats from regulators serve to motivate voluntary participation in CSR initiatives, even if
they include sanctioning mechanisms that overcome the poor performance-participation correlation mentioned above (120). The formal education and environmental expertise of a chief
executive officer also correlates with participation (121), illustrating the importance of internal company factors such as organization culture (8, 122). A sector with close business-tobusiness relations—where companies buy and
sell to each other—also enhances the potential
for effectiveness (10, 123).
Within specific policy issue areas, authors
argue for or against the usefulness of CSR activities in addressing underlying public policy
problems. For water and energy sectors, for instance, concerns have been raised about voluntary CSR initiatives owing to the vital importance of these resources and the often-limited
capacity of governments to control corporate involvement (124). Conversely, case studies have identified successful examples of connections between impoverished producers and
niche markets for particular products. In these
cases, marketing ethical or environmentally
sound products can make a limited difference
(125).
Other research has examined participation
across industry-, government-, and NGOsponsored voluntary programs to assess differences in the diversity of stakeholders’ participation (56). At the global level, studies uncover
how particular CSR initiatives have built-in biases against particular stakeholders, e.g., those
from the developing world (74, 126). The limited attention to developing-world perspectives
also means that power imbalances between the
poor and corporations are overlooked, leading
to accountability problems with existing CSR
initiatives (127). Other analyses have also em-
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phasized the limited potential of CSR as a tool
for addressing poverty (128).
Following in this vein, CSR has been distinguished from corporate accountability in an
effort to emphasize that both are required for
corporations to have any potentially beneficial
effects on development. However, even in the
best case, broad changes in the global economy
are considered necessary for real changes to occur (129). Some place hope in the role of NGOs
and so-called antiglobalization or global justice
movements as the agents that would drive a major shift toward regulating activities of transnational corporations (94, 130).
As a response to these problems and criticisms, scholars have offered new frameworks
for improving the sustainability of CSR operations in the developing world (131). Multilateral development institutions are showing increasing interest in being drivers of global CSR
and its coordination to foster improved corporate accountability (132). Supporters of CSR
are also looking to these institutions to play a
role in enhancing developing country governments’ capacity (133), a crucial condition for
CSR to be effective.
Finally, some authors argue for and/or show
how CSR can benefit developing countries, either alone or in combination with traditional
development programs and projects. First, CSR
approaches could be usefully adopted by NGOs
and donors working on development issues
(134). Second, working with communities to
develop social capital is seen as a win-win for
corporations operating in the developing world
(135).
5. TOWARD AN EVOLUTIONARY
SENSITIVE CSR PROJECT
Another benefit of a more refined categorization of CSR is that it highlights, and allows
analysis of, how particular programs can evolve,
adapt, and change. For example, in 2005 the Responsible Care program created a third-party
monitoring component in response to criticism, which moved it closer to the privatesector hard law model. Similarly, the Fair Labor
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Association (FLA), spawned by the U.S. Apparel Industry Partnership, initially lacked welldeveloped mandatory standards or independent verification of compliance. But the FLA
developed a mandatory third-party auditing
system in 2002, which was implemented in
2003 (136) in response to competition with
the Workers Rights Consortium, a group established to investigate and report labor code
violations perpetrated by controversial factories (109, 137). Thus, it is important to note
that organizations can change in response to external pressures. Evolution may occur through
competition with other third-party certification
systems. This competition can lead business
associations that first initiated voluntary soft
law codes of conduct to be ultimately spun
off as independent organizations, for example, the American Forest and Paper Association’s voluntary code-of-practices program, the
Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), initially
developed in response to threats of regulation and the emergence of the FSC (86). Now
the SFI’s nine-member board comprises onethird business, one-third academic, and onethird NGO members. Though the governing
structure is more narrowly cast than the FSC
model and tends to include relatively moderate civil society interests, the SFI example
nicely illustrates the importance of assessing
how governing arrangements can change. Although clearly giving more authority to industry than the FSC model, the SFI has adapted
and included other nonfirm actors in ways
that few would have predicted just a few years
ago.
Given these dynamics, what path ought CSR
scholarship to take? Our answer also takes into
account that any analysis of CSR efforts should
assess not only existing impacts, but also the
potential of CSR innovation if it were to fully
institutionalize in a sector. The implications are
important: Empirical work is critical but, by itself, is insufficient for understanding the implications of CSR. Rather, we need better theories
about the evolutionary capacity of CSR initiatives to assess transformative capacity. A lack
of such theory development, combined with
a continuing focus only on the present and
the past, inadvertently increases the risk that
any practical advice offered from this type of
scholarship may make recommendations that
hamper, rather than improve, the potential of
CSR to address enduring global, social, and
environmental challenges. To illustrate the importance of such an approach, we briefly review Bernstein & Cashore’s (102) efforts to
understand the evolution of the private-sector
hard law form of CSR. Their framework delineates three phases through which initiative must
move to achieve full-fledged political legitimacy. Our focus on an evolutionary framework
moves beyond an emphasis solely on learning
and technical fixes, which, as we argued above,
can only make a difference in win-win situations. Instead, an evolutionary framework addresses ways in which win-lose situations might
be transformed to win-win situations as a hard
law system gains political legitimacy. By gaining legitimacy, they alter the firm’s cost-benefit
calculations by transforming the marketplace
environment. They facilitate the emergence of
the external benefits and/or costs of inaction
that shift situations from win-lose to win-win,
which is ultimately necessary for CSR initiatives
to succeed.
5.1. The Evolutionary Logic
and the Conundrum
NSMD systems exist within a suite of policy innovations that include corporate codes of
conduct that pose few or no mandatory rules
regarding on-the-ground behavioral changes,
and where businesses dominate policy development. Given this, what types of support might
firms be expected to grant NSMD systems?
Drawing on Bernstein & Cashore (102) we discern two phases that NSMD certification systems pass through toward their hypothesized
third and final phase of political legitimacy—
in which members of the sector collectively
agree to abide by the rules and procedures of
the NSMD governance system or a common
standard or set of standards across systems that
operate in a particular sector.
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5.2. Phase I: Initiation
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What types of firms, whose operations are the
target of a certification system, might be expected to join, at the outset, an NSMD certification? Moreover, why would any firm ever
join these hard law programs? After all, in most
sectors where NSMD certification is vying for
support, there are also more flexible or nonprescriptive programs they could join instead,
such as ISO 14001, the UN Global Compact or
Responsible Care. Hence, on the basis of existing work, described above, there remains an important gap in our understanding of why firms
seek to participate in NSMD hard law programs
when they impose greater requirements than
other CSR initiatives.
Many firms would indeed balk at supporting such systems precisely because they would
be viewed as imposing greater costs than benefits. Moreover, support translates to relinquishing their own authority to decide on what to do
about environmental issues when more palatable voluntary alternatives are available that
leave all, or a great deal of, discretion to individual firms. One would expect those firms
operating close to, or at, the requirements of
the certification system to be the first to join.
Thus, at the initial phase, when an NSMD hard
law initiative gains some degree of recognition,
it creates a degree of abstract economic benefits, either because they provide a boycott shield
or because membership will provide them environmental stewardship recognition in ways
unavailable to other CSR programs. Likewise,
firms that would have to undergo significant
changes and costs to meet the requirements of
the systems will be the last to join.
This argument also begs the question of why
some firms would already be practicing closer to
the standards of an NSMD system? In almost all
cases, the reason is public policy requirements,
i.e., what traditional governmental regulations
dictate about how firms must behave. When
government regulations are the most prescriptive, and when certification rules do not deviate too far from required practices, the greatest
support from firms can be expected. This does
not mean that all firms operating under these
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conditions will agree to join (because the costs
of foregoing autonomy is uncertain), but it does
mean the reverse is true. Those firms that are
not highly regulated by governments and that
compete with other nonregulated firms will be
much less likely to support certification, as it
could lead to their economic demise.
During this initial phase, it is important
to assess the evolving expectations of other
members of the NSMD community as well,
particularly environmental and social groups
that joined in order to ameliorate a particular environmental resource use or social problem. One would expect such members to
develop close community ties with those initial firms that have demonstrated that the rules
of the program are indeed obtainable and to
differentiate these firms as heroes from the villains,which have refused to participate. They
also have an interest in highlighting, emphasizing, or exaggerating the marginal on-theground changes that do occur to justify the
importance of their program.
5.3. Phase II: Gaining
Widespread Support
Given the expectation of limited uptake in
phase I, how might NSMD hard law systems
evolve to gain widespread support? Such support is necessary because any marginal improvements that occurred in Phase I will not,
by definition, be adequate to address the core
problems in a global sector for which NSMD
systems were designed (whether it be mining, forestry, fisheries, coffee, and so on). How
might NSMD certifications move to this second phase? The hurdles are immense and reveal a conundrum. First, to appeal to the firms
that did not join in Phase I, certification programs must, in the absence of increased market
incentives, relax their behavioral requirements.
That is, moving to Phase II requires readjusting
the cost-benefit calculations of firms that rejected membership during Phase I. Moreover,
because of the chicken and egg problem in developing certified markets in which supply and
demand must be in synchrony, market pressures
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can only advance incrementally. Behavioral requirements may have to be lowered, albeit until
markets are fully developed if Phase II is ever to
be achieved. However, the lesson from environmental and social groups in Phase I is that firms
can indeed meet the (relatively) high requirements. Over time, these environmental and social activists will want to demand an increase in
standards.
The challenge for those promoting NSMD
certification systems is to overcome this conundrum. If it is not overcome, we would expect a significant degree of competition between the NSMD certification systems and the
more palatable CSR alternatives. Whether and
how this conundrum might be overcome is a
key question facing students of CSR. Bernstein
& Cashore (102) have offered an initial set of
propositions that argue for greater attention on
norm generation and community building. The
point for this article is to illustrate how after isolating different phenomenon, conflated under
CSR, a much more complex and dynamic picture emerges about how support for a particular
taxonomic form is contingent upon, and interacts with, other CSR forms and existing governmental regulations. These interactions are
critical to understanding whether and how CSR
institutions might evolve to become enduring
and purposeful forms of global authority.
6. CONCLUSIONS
Do CSR efforts address enduring environmental and or sustainability challenges in ways that
traditional governmental approaches have been
unable to achieve? Are the impacts transformative or marginal? Do they provide interesting cases but fail to have widespread impact
on the problems for which they were created?
Or worse, are they best classified as an effort
to escape governmental regulation, resulting in
fewer behavioral changes than otherwise would
have occurred?
Here, we argue that to better address these
questions, two primary tasks must be undertaken. First, clearly specify the policy innovation and assess its relationship to the problem for which it was created. Second, assess
not only today’s impacts but the potential for
affecting behavioral change at a later time.
Such an approach requires not only developing correlations between support and impacts,
but also building theory on the causal mechanisms and temporal logic of different CSR
innovations. Arguably the most important efforts for making practical contributions are
those that undertake greater and more sophisticated theoretical work. For these reasons, both
scholars and practitioners must be neither preemptively Pollyannaish nor dismissive of CSR
innovations.
SUMMARY POINTS
1. A focus on what firm-focused efforts can do to ameliorate environmental and social
problems requires, as Vogel (1) explains, recognizing the difference between the old
and the new CSR. The former largely focuses on corporate philanthropic activity not
directly linked to a firm’s core business practices. The latter focuses on internalizing the
externalities produced by a firm’s core business activities
2. Distinguishing short-term win-win from win-lose outcomes helps separate motives for
participation and possible futures for CSR efforts. Attention to both is important for
different reasons. Seeking win-win technological solutions can help move us away from
suboptimal technologies. With win-lose situations, the critical issue is assessing how and
whether CSR initiatives can transform market conditions, over time, to make a win-lose
into a win-win situation.
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3. We identify seven ideal types of CSR innovations: individual firm efforts, individual
firm and individual NGO agreements, public-private partnerships, information-based
approaches, environmental management systems (EMSs), industry association corporate
codes of conduct, and private-sector hard law known in the scholarly literature as nonstate
market-driven (NSMD) governance.
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4. Our taxonomy permits the adoption of an evolutionary approach, which stands in contrast
to beyond compliance definitions prevalent in existing CSR scholarship. We argue for a
broader definition that captures dynamic changes within firms, the interaction of CSR
choices with the broader public-policy environment and organizational fields, and the
motivations for support.
5. These taxonomic categories are discussed according to whether their immediate and
long-term aim is to encourage broad-based stakeholder learning and/or direct prescriptive behavior and assess the potential transformative capacity of these different categories
of CSR in win-lose situations.
FUTURE ISSUES
1. Future work in this area would be well served to carefully specify the policy innovation
at hand and assess its relationship to the problem for which it was created.
2. Research should also consider not only today’s impacts but also reflect on the potential
different innovations have for transforming markets at a later time—ultimately the most
important question for understanding whether, and when, CSR initiatives might result
in significant behavioral change.
3. In order to make practical important contributions, CSR scholars must place greater
attention to building theory on causal mechanisms and the temporal logic of a range of
firm-focused policy innovations.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
G. Auld is a member of the Forest Stewardship Council’s environment chamber.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank David Vogel, Jonathon Koppell, and participants at the January 2007
Yale workshop on corporate social responsibility.
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Contents
Volume 33, 2008
Preface p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p pv
Who Should Read This Series? p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p pvi
I. Earth’s Life Support Systems
Climate Modeling
Leo J. Donner and William G. Large p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
Global Carbon Emissions in the Coming Decades: The Case of China
Mark D. Levine and Nathaniel T. Aden p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p19
Restoration Ecology: Interventionist Approaches for Restoring and
Maintaining Ecosystem Function in the Face of Rapid
Environmental Change
Richard J. Hobbs and Viki A. Cramer p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p39
II. Human Use of Environment and Resources
Advanced Passenger Transport Technologies
Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p63
Droughts
Giorgos Kallis p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p85
Sanitation for Unserved Populations: Technologies, Implementation
Challenges, and Opportunities
Kara L. Nelson and Ashley Murray p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 119
Forage Fish: From Ecosystems to Markets
Jacqueline Alder, Brooke Campbell, Vasiliki Karpouzi, Kristin Kaschner,
and Daniel Pauly p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 153
Urban Environments: Issues on the Peri-Urban Fringe
David Simon p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 167
Certification Schemes and the Impacts on Forests and Forestry
Graeme Auld, Lars H. Gulbrandsen, and Constance L. McDermott p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 187
vii
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III. Management, Guidance, and Governance of Resources and Environment
Decentralization of Natural Resource Governance Regimes
Anne M. Larson and Fernanda Soto p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 213
Enabling Sustainable Production-Consumption Systems
Louis Lebel and Sylvia Lorek p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 241
Global Environmental Governance: Taking Stock, Moving Forward
Frank Biermann and Philipp Pattberg p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 277
Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2008.33:413-435. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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Land-Change Science and Political Ecology: Similarities, Differences,
and Implications for Sustainability Science
B.L. Turner II and Paul Robbins p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 295
Environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis
Giles Atkinson and Susana Mourato p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 317
A New Look at Global Forest Histories of Land Clearing
Michael Williams p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 345
Terrestrial Vegetation in the Coupled Human-Earth System:
Contributions of Remote Sensing
Ruth DeFries p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 369
A Rough Guide to Environmental Art
John E. Thornes p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 391
The New Corporate Social Responsibility
Graeme Auld, Steven Bernstein, and Benjamin Cashore p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 413
IV. Integrative Themes
Environmental Issues in Russia
Laura A. Henry and Vladimir Douhovnikoff p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 437
The Environmental Reach of Asia
James N. Galloway, Frank J. Dentener, Elina Marmer, Zucong Cai,
Yash P. Abrol, V.K. Dadhwal, and A. Vel Murugan p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 461
Indexes
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 24–33 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 483
Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 24–33 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 487
Errata
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Environment and Resources articles may
be found at http://environ.annualreviews.org
viii
Contents