The Smoke and Mirrors Game of Global CSR Reporting: Issues and Fixes

Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, is a deeply embedded concept in Western society. It embodies the idea that corporations have an ethical responsibility to society beyond financial return, and beyond their immediate shareholders.

CSR organisations, contractors, and reporters have proliferated in recent decades as activist pressure around labour rights, equity, and environmental destruction including climate change has ramped up.

This book examines international regimes working to monitor CSR, such as The Global Compact and the EITI. We find the organisations rife with conflicts of interest, lacking the means of verifying information reported by corporations, and unable to enforce transgressions of the largest corporations in any meaningful way. We then turn to the burgeoning reporting industry that informs socially responsible investment, using a test case of severe human rights violations leading to death. In these cases as well, we find that while the incidents are reported, they are obscured in the reporting system and have very tangential and fleeting effects on CSR ratings.

We close the book with a series of suggestions about how to reform the CSR regime so that ethical investors can begin to have confidence the corporations will begin to live up to their promises. Until there is transparency and objectivity, CSR will remain a smoke-and-mirrors game of marketing over ethical responsibility.