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This chapter introduces the basic concepts and background references for the study. It illustrates the increasing attention of the international community at major global conferences to corporate environmental accountability and responsibility. Corporate accountability is initially circumscribed to the answerability of private companies to public expectations based on international environmental standards. This are the reasonable means to ensure the transparency and openness to all stakeholders of private companies' operations and decision-making, and to means to encourage the prevention of environmental harm or even a proactive contribution to the attainment of sustainable development by private companies. Corporate accountability is then differentiated from the idea of corporate responsibility, which focuses more on obligations or at least on result-oriented expectations for the conduct of the private sector and which seems still much more controversial at the intergovernmental level.

This chapter is based on an analysis and comparison of the instruments elaborated in the framework of the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation. It serves to assess whether a significant convergence in the choice of international environmental standards for private companies is occurring. Such assessment provides further historical and conceptual background to this research, in highlighting the different approaches adopted to ensure the responsible conduct of the private sector and the different processes and actors involved in the definition of these standards. Notwithstanding the different levels of international acceptance and the different approaches of these initiatives, the analysis of these instruments led to the identification of a striking convergence of selected international environmental standards for corporate accountability.

This chapter focuses on the impact of environmental human rights on foreign investors' operations and the role of intergovernmental organizations in ensuring that such operations respect internationally agreed minimum standards. In the context of international practice related to corporate environmental accountability, the chapter scrutinizes the preventive role of intergovernmental organizations vis-à-vis foreign investors' actual or potential negative impacts on environmental human rights in the country in which they are operating. It explores the growing international practice spearheaded by international organizations of ‘translating’ inter-state obligations into normative benchmarks adapted to the reality of private operators, mainly foreign investors, based upon the interpretation and implementation of a combination of international soft and hard law instruments. The contribution therefore assesses the relevance for foreign investment of corporate environmental accountability.

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between corporate strategy and corporate accountability, arguing that in Britain, and in Anglo-Saxon countries generally, there are substantial areas of weakness arising from this relationship. It reviews some of the more common fallacies about the nature and sources of competitive advantage, emphasizing that this source is a distinctive capability that is both sustainable and appropriable. The chapter next describes the characteristics of firms which fail to meet these tests of appropriability and sustainability, before considering the nature of distinctive capabilities that do meet these standards. Architecture and the governance structure are then discussed in more detail. Lastly, the chapter comments on short- and long-termisms and draws some policy implications thereof.

This chapter examines all of the national consumer activism campaigns for environmental protection and animal rights from 2004 – 2014. These 13 campaigns involved fossil fuels, pollution, deforestation, the killing of dolphins, and factory farming. Documentary filmmaking has played an important role in raising awareness about environmental issues and animal rights issues in the past decade. These campaigns strengthened democracy in the U.S. by increasing participation, expanding public deliberation, and advancing the will of the majority, especially pertaining to corporate operations in other countries. These campaigns also improved corporate accountability in areas regulated by the government.

This chapter examines 20 national conservative campaigns that used consumer activism from 2004 – 2014. These campaigns involved gun rights, abortion, opposition to LGBT rights, and a host of other “culture war” issues. Consumer activism continues to be mostly used by liberals, but since the 1970s, conservative organizations have organized marketplace activism more frequently to fight against shifting societal values. Conservative campaigns strengthened democracy by increasing overall rates of political participation and expanding public discussion of “culture war” issues. They also improved corporate accountability. On net, conservative use of consumer activism improves the health of democracy, but campaigns opposing LGBT rights weaken democracy by curbing minority rights and protections.

Recent popular and scholarly efforts to make sense of globalization and address its injustices have often traced the transnational movement of commodities, showing the social relations and material inequalities that emerge at various points in their travels. Toxic Injustice tells a story of lived globalization through the history of one pesticide—DBCP—tracing not just its creation, circulation, and use from the 1950s to the 1980s but also the workers’ and lawyers’ efforts since the 1980s to demand justice for the harms associated with it. Chapters address the development and toxicological testing of DBCP in the United States, its use in the United States and Central America, regulations put in place after its dangers were widely recognized, and workers’ efforts to gain compensation through transnational lawsuits and national movements.

This chapter argues that the role of institutional investors is crucial in matters of corporate accountability. After all, these investors, more than anyone, guard the savings of the people. Thus, the chapter provides an overview of two types of institutional investing: types A and B, with the former approach being the ideal. The chapter then explores the motivations surrounding the preference of most fund managers and trustees of one type to another. It re-examines the type A approach under such issues as free-rider problems, the internationalization of stock-markets, insider trading, responding to bids, and the fact that the type B process has become so engrained as to make change difficult.

There are two different ways in which responsibility may be ascribed to an agent for the same event. One way focuses on the responsibility for some action at the time of its occurrence, and the other on responsibility for an action at a time subsequent to the action. The former are referred to as ascriptions of synchronic responsibility, and the latter as diachronic responsibility. This chapter examines different accounts of the right relationship between diachronic and synchronic responsibility by focusing on BP’s responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It is suggested that studies of self-narrative development in corporations could reveal stages of corporate cultural maturity according to the extent of illusion, delusion, falsehood, and fabrication in the self-narratives that shape corporate cultures and are relevant to diachronic responsibility.