The Corporate Citizen: Friend or foe of sustainable development?

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Author(s)
Howes, Michael
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2005
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Will corporations help or hinder efforts to achieve sustainable development? This question is addressed by working through the three main kinds of business responses to environmental risks that have been identified by Doyle and McEachern - rejection, accommodation and environmental. This paper links these categories to discursive struggle between neo-liberalism, weak and strong ecological modernisation respectively using examples from the USA, UK and Australia. It is argued that knowledge and discourses have a significant impact on the stance adopted by firms and on their capacity for change. This in turn has a major effect ...
View more >Will corporations help or hinder efforts to achieve sustainable development? This question is addressed by working through the three main kinds of business responses to environmental risks that have been identified by Doyle and McEachern - rejection, accommodation and environmental. This paper links these categories to discursive struggle between neo-liberalism, weak and strong ecological modernisation respectively using examples from the USA, UK and Australia. It is argued that knowledge and discourses have a significant impact on the stance adopted by firms and on their capacity for change. This in turn has a major effect on the ability of the state to implement environmental policies. These observations are related to the broader concept of reflexive modernisation.
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View more >Will corporations help or hinder efforts to achieve sustainable development? This question is addressed by working through the three main kinds of business responses to environmental risks that have been identified by Doyle and McEachern - rejection, accommodation and environmental. This paper links these categories to discursive struggle between neo-liberalism, weak and strong ecological modernisation respectively using examples from the USA, UK and Australia. It is argued that knowledge and discourses have a significant impact on the stance adopted by firms and on their capacity for change. This in turn has a major effect on the ability of the state to implement environmental policies. These observations are related to the broader concept of reflexive modernisation.
View less >
Conference Title
Ecopolitics XVI Conference: Transforming Environmental Governance for the 21st Century
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2005. The attached file is posted here with permission of the copyright owner for your personal use only. No further distribution permitted. For information about this conference please refer to the publisher's website or contact the author.