Sustainable development has become part of the zeitgeist of our age. It was reinforced by the United Nations 2030 development agenda calling for “a supremely ambitious and transformational vision” and putting forward seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure the health and well-being of our planet and future generations. The SDGs outline an ambitious agenda which organizations – individually and collectively – have great potential and capacity to contribute. Despite the progressive increase in income in most countries in the last decades, this is apparently not associated with improvements of all indicators, such as inequality, greenhouse gases and sustainable production and consumption. Many corporations expressed their commitments to improve the planet and society’s well- being and join the efforts to implement the agenda. There is also a growing body of research over the last decades on the topic pertaining to corporations and sustainable development, but key gaps still appear regarding the place of corporations in the governance of sustainable development. These “Governance Gaps” involve several unresolved issues pertaining the role, capacity and impacts of corporations to address sustainable development issues, which will be explored in this symposium, such as: (i) Sustainable development agendas tend to combine local and global impacts and solutions on a global level, yet corporations’ influence and interests are confined to their specific areas of operation; (ii) Many sustainable development goals are long term, beyond the usual short-term thinking of many corporations (e.g., quarters’ results); (iii) Conventional systems of governmental regulation rarely extend beyond national borders; (iv) International organizations’ power on corporation is often limited and contingent; (v) Governance mechanisms have transparency and participation at their core, which is frequently incompatible with competitive business environments and the need to safeguard trade secrets; (vi) Corporations respond to markets, which not always give incentives to sustainable behavior. Nevertheless, corporations are well- placed to help to connect the local and the global, by virtue of their own organizational reach, the supply chain positioning, their power to inform and shape consumer behavior, their responsibility for and impacts on natural resources and societies. So corporations are critical but their roles potentially vary enormously, depending on their ownership, sector, size and ‘home’ and other countries of operation. Each of the gaps above has an institutional dynamics steering corporations in certain (un)sustainable directions, and these dynamics varies across scales, places and sectors. On the other hand, corporations are also important to shape many of the institutions that influence the response of the companies to the gaps above. The range of mechanisms for bridging the gaps for governance of sustainable development is potentially large. The instruments can vary from being relatively ‘soft’ to relatively ‘hard’ (e.g. from principles, incentives, standards, to mandates). Moreover, the sources of governance for sustainable development can differ (e.g. company, business-wide, civil society, government, partnership / multi-stakeholder), and these sources bring different levels of autonomy to corporations. The panel aims to discuss how to bridge the governance gaps and analyze the roles of corporations in the governance of sustainable development (whether in case studies or in aggregate studies) and to explore key issues related to governance. The panel is designed to capturing experiences in various parts of the world, in different societal, environmental, political and business contexts, and enabling more general insights into the nature and effects of corporate roles in the governance of sustainability. In this light, it is intended that more interactive aiming also at identifying research ideas to address the core theme.