States and Firms Co-producing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the Developing World

Abstract

This article examines policy options that are co-produced by both states and firms, with the purpose of regulating an area of public policy and the practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by companies. The contributions of this article are twofold. First, it creates a typology of the co-production of corporate social responsibility, adding “delegated,” “brokered,” and “partnership” as intermediate categories between the natural end points of “voluntary” and “regulated.” Second, it proposes a framework for understanding why governments opt for a particular version of co-produced regulation, by focusing on the interaction between two key variables, the “net enforcement cost” and the “political salience of the demand for regulation.” The framework is tested on examples of the co-production of CSR from Argentina and Peru, where I identify pathways of change from one category of co-production to another.