Fostering Corporate Responsibility through Self- and Co-regulation

3. Sector-specific initiatives as forms of self- and co-regulation
The development of
self- and co-regulation
depends on the particular
problem to be addressed
throuch public-private
collaboration.
Soft law
Soft law
Similar to partnering initiatives, the most common
roles that public actors play within softlaw
initiatives are contributing and facilitating.
Regarding the former, they provide financial
support – though it is often not substantial and
limited to member fees and other small contributions
– as well as technical assistance and
know-how. Regarding the latter, public actors
often serve as (co-)initiators and patrons of
such initiatives, thereby lending credibility to
soft regulation.
In contrast to awareness-raising and partnering
initiatives, however, soft-law initiatives
also involve governments as regulators. Public
actors often participate in the definition of
certain standards or encourage companies to
participate voluntarily. Especially in public-procurement
intensive sectors, such as construction
and wholesale and retail, public actors can
themselves be among the targets of such regulation.
Lastly, public actors frequently perform
monitoring functions in soft-law initiatives,
which seems to play a significant role in determining
whether they perform well.
Mandating
Mandating
Although we only identified two mandating initiatives
in the course of our research, it is still
possible to provide a basic idea about the role of
public actors by taking into account their general
features. Correspondingly, public actors
play a key role as regulators (i.e., standard-setters)
and managers, especially in terms of monitoring,
and sometimes also provide assistance
and technical know-how.
In sum, the four roles that governments play in
sector-specific initiatives find expression in four
types of sector-specific initiatives according to
their goals and rationales: awareness-raising,
partnering, soft law and mandating. Interestingly,
if the rarer mandating type is disregarded,
one sees that none of the other types is particularly
dominant within the eight countries despite
their different types of market economies,
corporatist traditions and governmental CR policies.
21 Rather, a more important factor in determining
the type of initiative is the concrete
problem in a given industry and/or country that
needs to be addressed and solved through public-private
collaboration.
Role of private actors
As these four roles of government suggest, public
actors do not necessarily have to be among
the initiators of sector-specific initiatives in
order to promote them. In fact, in many cases,
they join initiatives that were launched by
solely private actors, such as e trade associations,
business networks, individual companies
and CSOs, at an earlier stage.
The role of trade associations deserves particular
mention: Whenever public actors have not
been initially involved in launching a sectorspecific
initiative, this role has usually been
played by trade associations. Indeed, they have
been initiators and decisive multiplicators of
CR initiatives because they are natural intermediaries
between companies that are otherwise
competitors. At the same time, some initiatives
have also been launched by individual companies,
business or CR networks.
16