Abstract
Companies have caught the changes in consumer perceptions and have developed corporate social responsibility (CSR) as long run survival strategy. The CSR signals that companies are overcoming the logic of the short term. The question is whether an evolution towards something similar that we call State social responsibility (SSR) is possible. State social responsibility is exerted when the State, in absence (or in case of ineffectiveness) of a formal supranational law, protects the rights of current and future generations of its citizens and citizens of other states and/or raises the current generations’ awareness regarding the opportunities reduction generated in space and time by meta-externalities. States would signal the tendency to overcome their short-sighted logic if the meta-externalities became a crucial question in their agenda.
Highlights
Corporations are often accused of damaging the environment and it is not clear what should be the appropriate correction of the external effects they produce
Even though there are various corporate social responsibility (CSR) area we focus on environmental issues because the role played by states and firms to solve meta-externalities is distinctive
The idea behind this paper is that, in addition to a company which evolves and carries out its activities beyond what is required by law, we need a State which goes beyond what is required by State Responsibility in its operations
Summary
Corporations are often accused of damaging the environment and it is not clear what should be the appropriate correction of the external effects they produce. Companies have more than one reason for adopting environmentally responsible behaviour and ethical and economic motivations co-exist [1,2]. The paper analyses the conditions that affect strategic decisions by firms adopting environmental CSR with the aim to understand if States might find it convenient to adopt, in turn, social responsibility practices. It proposes an attempt to specify how just an increase in the collective/ individual awareness of existing meta-externalities can be the driver toward an effective Social State Responsibility. If the issue of meta-externalities became central rather than marginal, i.e. if states provided an adequate balance of the apparently conflicting rights of current and future generations, they would show the same tendency observed in recent firms’ behaviour to overcome the shortterm logic
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