CONCLUSION
The public debate on CSR is plagued by rhetoric. Corporate executives
resort to any excuse to avoid responsibility which cuts into the
bottom line. A thousand NGOs make a thousand different demands of
corporations. To get from rhetoric to substance, debates and policies
need to be informed by ethical theory, which distinguishes between
ethically relevant and irrelevant arguments.
The SIP “Business ethics for multinational corporations in developing
countries” has grounded corporate responsibility more fundamentally
in ethical theory. It has shown that corporate responsibilities go beyond
maximizing owner returns, and are more extensive the worse the
institutional environment in the country of operation.
Questions of how corporations can most effectively address their
responsibilities remain. Moreover, public policy has been dominated
by voluntary initiatives such as the EITI or the UN Global Compact.
These initiatives are unlikely to take us very far, corporations need to
face harder incentives to act on their responsibilities. As the economic
models developed under the programme show, getting the incentives
right is not necessarily easy. Ethical behaviour can be difficult to elicit,
and further work is needed in this area.