Government and Corporate Sustainability

This chapter presents an introduction to the relationship between government policy and corporate sustainability. It opens with a review of the dichotomous and related perspectives on government and corporate sustainability, revealing why the question of a relationship is quite contentious. Having established the normative, conceptual and empirical significance of the relationship, it proceeds by indicating the types of corporate sustainability issues that government policies address, the types of policies that are deployed and the alternative corporate responses to such policies. These relationships are illustrated with reference to four well-known corporate sustainability issues: corporate philanthropy, ethical trade, corporate sustainability reporting and corporate taxation. Finally, the chapter focuses on two cases of complementarity between government policies and private initiatives for corporate sustainability, responses to: dangerous work conditions in the Bangladesh ready-made garment industry; and corrupt uses of payments to government by corporations in the extractives industry.