Mia Mahmudur Rahim

Meta-Regulation Approach of Law: A Potential Legal Strategy to Develop Socially Responsible Business Self-Regulation in Least Developed Common Law Countries

In the corporate regulation landscape, ‘meta-regulation’ is a comparatively new legal approach. The sketchy role of state promulgated authoritative laws in pluralized society and scepticism in corporate self-regulations role have resulted in the development of this legal approach. It has opened up possibilities to synthesize corporate governance to add social values in corporate self-regulation. The core of this approach is the fusion of responsive and reflexive legal strategies to combine regulators and regulatees for reaching a particular goal. This paper argues that it is a potential strategy that can be successfully deployed to develop a socially responsible corporate culture for the business enterprises, so that they will be able to acquire social, environmental and ethical values in their self-regulation sustainably. Taking Bangladeshi corporate laws as an instance, this paper also evaluates the scope of incorporating this approach in laws of the least developed common law countries in general.

Corporate Social Responsibility–Oriented Compliances and SMEs Access to Global Market: Evidence from Bangladesh

The convergence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance has immense impact on the participants in global supply chains. The global buyers and retailers tend to incorporate CSR in all stages of product manufacturing within their supply chains. The incorporated CSR thus creates the difficulty to small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs). Incompetence in standardized CSR practices is an important issue that causes SMEs either losing their scope to access global market directly or serving as subcontractors to large enterprises. This article explores this issue by focusing on Bangladeshi SMEs under the CSR requirement of the important global buyer.

Corporate Governance as Social Responsibility: A Meta-regulation Approach to Raise Social Responsibility of Corporate Governance in a Weak Economy

Corporate governance (CG) denotes the rules of business decision-making and directs the internal mechanism of companies to follow the output of the rules. It includes the customs, policies, laws and institutions as a set of processes that affects the way in which a corporation is directed, administered or controlled. In the aftermath of some corporate scandals and with the rise of civil society campaigns against the negative impact of corporate operations on the environment, corporate governance has started emphasizing issues that go beyond this traditional focus to touch on corporate ethics, accountability, disclosure and reporting. ‘As companies seek to assure regulators and investors that they are fully transparent and accountable, corporations have increasingly pledged their commitment to honest and fair corporate governance principles on a wide spectrum of business practices’ (Gill, 2008, p. 453).

The New Governance Approach to the Devolution of Corporate Governance

The moral arguments associated with justice, fairness and communitarianism have rejected the exclusivity of cost–benefit analysis in corporate governance. Particularly, the percepts of new governance (NG) have included distributive aspects in efficiency models focused on maximizing profits. While corporate directors were only assigned to look after the return of investment within the traditional framework of corporate governance (CG), NG has created the scope for them to look beyond the set of contractual liabilities. This article explores how and how far NG notions have contributed to the devolution of CG to create internal strategies focusing on actors, ethics and accountability in corporate self-regulation.

CSR in Private Enterprises in Developing Countries

This book examines and evaluates how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a business agenda is growing and becoming recognised in the private enterprises of developing countries taking the readymade garments (RMG) industry of Bangladesh as a case study.In Bangladesh, CSR is growing in importance in corporate businesses in response to global trends. This book finds that the overall application of CSR in private enterprises in this country is emerging and progressing in an incoherent manner. This is due to certain challenges and constraints, notably the absence of multi-player activities, lack of adequate public sector interventions, and an absence of a national consensus on CSR or uniform CSR guidelines. The position is somewhat different in the private enterprises of the Bangladesh’s (RMG) industry. This sector is the largest source of this country’s export earnings. The practices of labour and environment-related CSR in the form of social compliance requirements from the international buyers are growing steadily in this industry. Also there is a trend of the development of the multi-player activism for the promotion of compliance with these requirements in it. But changes seem only to be occurring in the large contracting enterprises and the enterprises of Export Processing Zones (EPZ). A huge number of small and medium scale enterprises and non-contracting enterprises remain non-participants in this trend. The reasons for this include insufficient co-ordination among stakeholders, resource constraints in factories, the absence of concrete guidelines from government and associations, lack of awareness among workers about their rights, and the absence of firm commitments from international buyers.

The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Corporate Governance: The Rise of Standardization of CSR Principles

The synergy between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance (CG) has changed the commercial environment. It has developed a complex and multi dimensional organizational phenomenon that could be defined as the extent and the way in which a business corporation can pragmatically respond to its consumer and society. This synergy has joined the political endeavours to make corporations more attuned to public, environmental and social needs. It has standardized CSR principles and created the agencies specialized in broader ethical considerations of business corporations. This chapter deals with these issues. It assesses how the impact of CSR on CG has contributed to the standardization of CSR principles and the rise of agencies specialized in facilitating social responsibility performance of business corporations.

Harnessing SD and CSR within Corporate Self‐Regulation of Weak Economies - A Meta‐Regulation Approach

The semantic of the terms “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” have changed over time to a point where these concepts have become two interrelated processes for ensuring the far-reaching development of society. Their convergence has given dimension to the environmental and corporate regulation mechanisms in strong economies. This article deals with the question of how the ethos of this convergence could be incorporated into the self-regulation of businesses in weak economies where nonlegal drivers are either inadequate or inefficient. It proposes that the policies for this incorporation should be based on the precepts of meta-regulation that have the potential to hold force majeure, economic incentives, and assistance-related strategies to reach an objective from the perspective of weak economies.

Trends in CSR Practices in Developed and Developing Countries

Increasingly, companies around the world are integrating CSR as a business strategy into their policies and practices. There are many factors at play augmenting the increased awareness of CSR. From the absolute business point of view, the need to protect brand image and reputation of business act as a driving force for companies to apply CSR. At the international level, the various NGOs, multi-stakeholder forums, and intergovernmental CSR initiatives through adopting voluntary codes of conduct and other partnership and networking activities appear to be instrumental in establishing and promoting CSR as an integral part of corporate business. At the national level, corporations are adopting CSR as a policy-matter of the business in response to the rising demands of different stakeholders’ interests, competition for access into global markets, and importantly satisfying the social needs.

Corporate Social Responsibility Implementation in the EU and USA: The Trend and the Way Forward

The core principles of CSR are being integrated into the core policy objectives of different economies and global companies and are also moving beyond their individual business initiatives. This integration can be seen from individual states’ perspectives; states are also accepting these issues in their socio-economic strategies and thus are establishing these issues within national economies. Given this background, this chapter explicates the trends in implementing CSR principles in the EU and USA. It demonstrates that companies in the developed countries use a mix of different strategies to incorporate CSR principles in their self-regulatory mechanisms. Strategies based on legal regulation are not foremost in this mix; rather, in these countries regulation-based strategy is meant to assist the non-legal drivers of CSR.

Legal Activism for Ensuring Environmental Justice

Abstract This article reviews some of the roles environmental lawyers have played in ensuring environmental justice in Bangladesh. It leans on law and social movement theories to explicate the choice (and ensuing success) of litigation as a movement strategy in Bangladesh. The activists successfully moved the courts to read the right to a decent environment into the fundamental right to life, and this has had the far-reaching effect of constituting a basis for standing for the activists and other civil society organisations. The activists have also sought to introduce emerging international law principles into the jurisprudence of the courts. These achievements notwithstanding, the paper notes that litigation is not a sustainable way to institute enduring environmental protection in any jurisdiction and recommends the utilisation of the reputation and recognition gained through litigation to deploy or encourage more sustainable strategies.