Imagining Corporate Sustainability as a Public Good Rather than a Corporate Bad
30 Pages Posted: 7 Nov 2014
Date Written: October 21, 2011
Abstract
This Article argues that addressing corporate sustainability by putting the onus on corporations to assess the sustainability of their operations may get the solution exactly backwards, at least at this early stage in advancing sustainability. Rather than view the lack of sustainability efforts as another corporate bad that individual corporations should be required to redress, this Article advocates that corporate sustainability should be treated instead as a public good that becomes the government’s responsibility. Information about an industrial sector’s sustainability profile — for example, a life cycle analysis of a typical facility — has clear public good qualities associated with it. This type of assessment allows for cross comparisons between competitors, identifies areas for possible synergies among producing companies, and highlights areas that may ultimately deserve further regulatory oversight. Equally important, if sustainability analyses concerning various production processes and services are produced in the first instance by publicly funded, third-party experts rather than extracted from private actors, the resulting reports are more likely to be reliable, complete, and accessible to a wide-range of stakeholders who can use them in public-benefitting ways.
Keywords: corporate sustainability, public good, corporate bad, government responsibility, industrial sector, regulatory oversight, production processes and services, public benefit
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