An introduction to governance for corporate responsibility

摘要: In July 2014, a draft set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was delivered by the UN Open Working Group (UN OWG, 2014). In January 2016, the SDGs replaced the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which constituted the international community’s most ambitious push against poverty so far. This does not mean that the MDGs were achieved. Rather, progress across the various MDGs is reported to be very uneven (United Nations, 2013, 2014). For instance, while the number of people has been halved that live in extreme poverty and that have no sustainable access to improved sources of drinking water; one in eight people worldwide remain hungry and global greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise. In addition, progress towards the MDGs is uneven among and within countries. Hence, there is still a significant way to go in order to meet today’s most severe development as well as environment challenges.Three types of actors play a specific role in addressing these challenges: traditionally, contributing to sustainable development targets would be a task assigned to actors involved in development cooperation–both state agencies that distribute Official Development Assistance (ODA) and civil society organizations involved in development cooperation. Recently, businesses have come more into the focus 1 (Adelman, 2003; Fengler & Kharas, 2010): they feature as a relevant component in new ‘aid landscapes’(Greenhill, Prizzon, & Rogerson, 2013; Nunnenkamp, 2004; Thrane, Johansen, & Jakobsen, 2006). The increasing role of corporate aid is due, among others, to the complex nature of many sustainable development …