trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

well as their contribution to the sustainable development. Therefore a conceptual framework isdeveloped in order to study the legal effectiveness of SCCs in respect to enhancing sustainabledevelopment.The insufficient legal framework appears to be the second barrier to the realization of the ultimategoal of SCCs and to their use generally. The existing contract law seems unsuitable to deal with oftenunspecific sustainability contractual provision. Therefore new regulatory regimes and combination ofthe existing regulations should be sought to establish an adequate legal framework allowing and securinglegally effective use of SCCs in international business relations.The third barrier to the realization of the ultimate goal of SCCs is the vague character of the ethicalstandards. The contractual parties have great difficulties formulating SCCs precisely enough to beenforceable and broadly enough to comprehend the underlying ethical principle.The present paper aims to contribute to overcome the first barrier by examining what the legal statusand power of SCCs is. The method chosen is conceptualization of SCCs based on a literature review and alegal analysis of selected hard and soft legal instruments currently in force. The findings should thenassist and ease overcoming of the second and third barriers.3. Literature review3.1. Scope of literatureThis part of the article provides a brief overview of legal literature addressing specifically the role ofinternational private contracts within the CSR area. Only selected writings are covered representing themajor thoughts on the matter developed within the period from 2006 to 2011. Papers containinganalysis of contract law or contracts in CSR only as a marginal issue or mainly from other than legalperspective (such as political science) or geographically limited case study papers are not included. Thisliterature review is taken as a starting point in developing a conceptual framework for research withinthe SCCs. It helps to conceptualize the SCCs and their role in the business and the regulatoryenvironment.Literature dealing thoroughly with different purposes and the role of contracts in the regula-toryenvironment of CSR is only scarce (Vandenbergh 2007, 925-926). Since the failure of pub-lic governancewithin the CSR area became evident and new types of private governance emerged, legal scholars havefocused primarily on the transnational private regulation resem-bling the traditional public governance(Vandenbergh 2007, 915), such as standards developed in public-private cooperation, business set ofstandards, or industry self-regulation. Although the fact that multinational companies may directlyinfluence their suppliers and business partners had been acknowledged, codes of conduct had been thefocal point of the legal scholarship in this area, and the governance through private contracts hadremained unnoticed for a long time. The interest into governance of CSR issues through privatecontracts mirrored the economic growth of enterprises (Mayer and Gereffi 2010, 5). Emerging duringnineties, it accelerated af-ter 2005 following the extensive publication about sustainability strategies andcodes of conduct of leading multinational enterprises, such as Wal-Mart, Inc. (Vandenbergh 2007;Backer 2007).375