Corporate governance for sustainability : Statement (original) (raw)
Related papers
Corporate Governance and Sustainability: A time for reassessment?
www.iodonline.com: http://www.iodonline.com/images/lgc2013/theme.pdf , 2013
Questions the value and contribution of contemporary approaches to corporate governance with its focus upon structures and preocuupation with 'culture change' when there are cost-effective ways of quickly changing behaviour, ensuring compliance, enabling more responsible and sustainable purchasing decisions and delivering other benefits with existing people, cultures and structures.
Recommendations [17th International Conference on Corporate Governance and Sustainability]
Directors should not assume that corporate governance approaches and codes developed in the past in another country and in response to different problems and priorities should necessarily be appropriate for their enterprises. They should review and revise governance arrangements to ensure these are right for a company’s aspirations, context and stage of development. When and where directors and boards feel that laws, regulations, codes, standards and other requirements and expectations are unreasonably onerous, inflexible, costly to implement, out-of-date or obstacles to creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship they should speak up. Responses to consultations on new proposals and changes in areas like corporate governance and reporting should not be left to those who claim expertise, but who may have a vested interest in greater complexity that generates additional business for themselves. Excessive regulation can add to the costs of doing business and can be counter productive. The desire for good governance and sustainability should come from within directors and boards. It cannot be – and should not be – imposed. Overall, boards need more integrated thinking and more holistic approaches. This does not mean that they need complex models which suggest they are going around in circles. They need to identify and focus on what is important. Rather than a separate sustainability strategy, companies need integrated business strategies that are sustainable. Suggested conference recommendations prepared by Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas and delivered on 26th October 2017 during the valedictory session of the 17th International Conference on Corporate Governance and Sustainability held at the Millennium Hotel London Mayfair, 44 Grosvenor Square, London W1, (UK)
Editorial: Recent debates on corporate governance and sustainability
Corporate Governance and Sustainability Review, 2021
Corporate governance and sustainability issues created dialogues among researchers, practitioners, regulators, and policy-makers. This is not surprising due to the impact of such debates on organisational performance, environmental and social issues relevant to Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs). The six papers published in this issue add to our knowledge various implications and social applications and offer the opportunity to gain a better understanding of corporate governance and sustainability in different contexts and settings
Coulson-Thomas, Colin (2022), [Theme Paper] 2022 London Global Convention on Corporate Governance and Sustainability, Building an Effective Board that Works and Top Global Trends, www.iodglobal.com [https://iodglobal.com/front\_assets/images/events/lgc\_theme\_paper\_2022.pdf, 13th September], 2022
For many boards the contemporary business environment is challenging against a background of continuing consequences of collective business and lifestyle impacts upon the environment and natural world that raise questions about our prospects of survival. It also raises questions about the purpose and contribution of corporate governance, whose interests it serves, and its role in facilitating needed adaptation, responsible innovation, transition and transformation journeys, and the collective responses needed to confront a challenge such as climate change. Its purpose, focus and relevance and governance and sustainability expectations, requirements and practices may need to be reviewed. New approaches, models and practices may be required if governance is to embrace networks, value chains and collaborative responses to existential threats. Perhaps corporate governance should be seen as a means to a desired end, rather than as an end in itself. Corporate governance arrangements, mechanisms, structures, processes, procedures and practices could be consciously and explicitly re-purposed to increase the focus upon responsible and collective action to address shared existential challenges and negative externalities, and achieve more socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes. There are many issues and questions for directors and boards to consider in relation to effective climate governance, ESG strategies and sustainability, enhancing board committee performance, transforming risks into opportunities, technology governance and strategy, governance for a new era, diversity and inclusion, value driven governance and sustainability, and how accounts, reports and other inputs to decision makers should fairly reflect the externalities of corporate operations and activities. They could also explore how the purpose of governance and the focus of boards might better serve the interests of a wider range of stakeholders and embrace social and environmental considerations and more explicitly encompass responses to existential threats and ensuring human activities and lifestyles are responsible, sustainable and in harmony with our planet’s eco-systems.
Corporate governance and sustainability
The paper focuses on Sustainability and Corporate Governance from the point of view of integration and, in connection with the measurement of corporate performance, Corporate Sustainability Reporting is also gaining in importance. Corporate Governance is understood as a key element when reaching economic performance and growth enabling to increase the investors' trust. Further on, it enables to create the structures supporting determination, control and reach of corporate objectives and targets. It provides creation of suitable initiatives for the members of administrative bodies and the management. In accordance with the OECD principles (OECD Principles, 2004) it is assumed that the effectively functioning Corporate Governance system within the company and across the whole economy assists to create the confidence and trust necessary for existence of the market economy. A very wide spectrum of sectors coming under the Corporate Governance also appears when trying to define this term succinctly. Integrated with sustainability which is defined as corporate strategy, long-term corporate goals are followed along with effectiveness, performance and competitiveness by means of incorporating of economic, environmental and social aspects into corporate governance.
Corporate Governance and Sustainability: Rhetoric or Reality?
Corporate Governance and Sustainability: Rhetoric or Reality? in J S Ahluwalia (Editor), Principled Corporate Governance: Sustainability for Boardroom Effectiveness, New Delhi, IOD Publishing, 2013
Does corporate governance as it is currently practised actually lead to sought after changes of behaviour? ‘New leadership’ puts more emphasis upon the monitoring and achievement of results. It is less focussed upon planning and top-down approaches and more concerned with implementation and providing better support to key work-groups that deliver priority corporate objectives. The ‘new leadership’ needed to fully exploit the findings of a five-year investigation undertaken by the author recognises the importance of providing people with better support in order to implement policies and strategy and deliver corporate objectives. It shifts the emphasis from motivating and managing people to helping them and making much more effective use of corporate know-how, and particularly of how best to do important activities, jobs and tasks.
Editorial: Current issues in corporate governance and sustainability
Corporate Governance and Sustainability Review
Debates on current issues of governance and sustainability remain open dialogues among scholars, practitioners, regulators, and policymakers towards a good balance between ecological, social, and economic return of strategic investment decisions (Alkaraan, 2018). Such dialogues are matters of critical issues relevant to Sustainable Development Goals (Alkaraan, 2021a). The five papers published in this issue add to our knowledge and offer a better understanding of the influence of contextual factors surrounding governance and sustainability issues in different contexts and settings.
Sustainable Corporate Governance: The Role of the Law
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
Sustainability is a buzzword and a policy goal. It synthesizes the aim to reduce the environmental and social imbalances of the world we live in, such as resource depletion, environment degradation, and inequality, among others. Traditionally, in economics, such imbalances have been characterized as negative externalities, namely the adverse impact of economic activities on the welfare of individuals and groups uninvolved in these activities. Regulation has policed these externalities by way of taxes or subsidies, regulations, and market-based instruments such as tradable pollution permits. The performance of these legal tools has been questioned on the grounds of their limited effectiveness. As a result, policymakers have switched gears and increasingly rely on financial markets
Wuppertal Papers, 2003
Transnational corporations' (TNCs) economic operations cover numerous countries and can be diverted between several continents. These units have reached a level of significance, having not only economic, but also social and environmental implications. This justifies that they shall be treated separately as a social phenomenon, when considering strategies for the development towards sustainability. This paper presents the concept of Responsible Corporate Governance (RCG), as a strategy to "govern" TNCs. RCG is suggested as a stakeholder based policy instrument, which aims at allocating responsibilities to societal actors aiming at corporate accountability. RCG recognises that the process of societal change is strongly based on what can be called as bottom up-processes. Learning processes take place through the interaction of the different societal members, which eventually leads to macro changes. Therefore, governing TNCs towards sustainability improvements is considered to be a collective process including all stakeholders. Firstly, the paper places the concept of RCG in the ongoing debate of political modernization based on the fact that society develops overtime and the political system must correspondingly modernize. In this context, political overload developed as a consequence of increased resource interdependencies is explained and as a resolution, network approach is discussed. Secondly, demands on the orientation of the TNCs in terms of accountability and innovative action are brought forward. Here, the paper also lists down corporate elements (stakeholder empowered corporate governance, management and performance evaluation systems, transparency enhancement and accountability verification), which need to be in place to attain an accountable orientation in the society. Following, using an analytical framework, the orientation and capabilities of each societal actor (environmental non-governmental organisations, financial institutions, intergovernmental organisations) to affect improvements in the corporate responsibility elements are investigated and recommendations for their effective orientation are listed. We would like to sincerely thank Jola Welfens for her review, Timo Busch for his valuable and extensive input regarding the section on financial institutions, Andreas Villar and Martin Herrndorf for their indispensable work, Wolfgang Sachs, Tilman Santarius and Yuval Somekh for his comments, Monika Kieslich for her efforts to make this paper reader friendly and many more, whose name we can not state here, for their contribution to this Wuppertal Paper.