Saturday, February 16, 2013

Part 15: The U.S. National Contact Point: Corporate Social Responsibility Between Nationalism, Internationalism and Private Markets Based Globalization

 (Pix Source HERE)


This Blog Essay site devotes every February to a series of integrated but short essays on a single theme. For 2013 this site introduces a new theme: The U.S. National Contact Point: Corporate Social Responsibility Between Nationalism, Internationalism and Private Markets Based Globalization.

Part 15:  The U.S. NCP and Specific Instance Claims:  The Obama Administration NCP Reorganization Cases 2012 Cont.

This series builds on some ideas I have been working through for a number of years relating to a fundamental shift in the approaches to corporate governance that broaden the ambit of corporate governance issues from a singular focus on internal governance (the relationships among officers, shareholders and directors) to one that includes corporate behavior and the standards by which officers, directors and shareholders exercise their respective governance authority. This shift also changes the scope of what is understood as "law" to be applied to issues of corporate governance, from one principally focused on national law to governance norms that may be sourced in the declarations and other governance interventions of public and private international bodies. Lastly, it appears to point to an evolution to the role of the state from the principal source of standards and enforcer of law to a vehicle for the implementation of international standards  in which enforcement power is left to global market actors--principally consumers and investors function of the decisions of global actors.  All of this is inconsistent with traditional notions of the role of law, the scope of corporate governance and the nature of corporate social responsibility int he United States.  The extent to which the United States participates in the construction of these autonomous international systems may suggest the direction in which government policy may be moving away from the traditional consensus of corporate responsibility to something perhaps entirely new.

We continue to examine how basic US policy on the outbound application of the MNE Guidelines, and the US commitment to ensure that the MNE Guidelines acquire no indicia of law have shaped the work of the US NCP, even after the extensive reorganization and re-invigoration of of the NCP and its movement to the CSR. The object of this post is to consider the import of all of the US NCP's claims and extract an aggregate picture of its practices, one that does not seem to have changed to any appreciable extent after the reorganization of 2011-2012


UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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