La régulation, enjeu majeur de l’ordre public économique : l’exemple des démarches de Responsabilité sociale des entreprises des pouvoirs privés économiques

Regulatory laws can be identified as flexible and increasingly co-constructed by public authorities and private economic powers through compliance. Thus, regulatory laws participate in maintaining economic public order, mainly through competition law, but also with regard to other imperatives such as sustainable development, from which Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) stems. CSR particularly highlights the normative dialogue that exists between public sources of law and private sources of law, between hard law and soft law, and is to be understood within a graduated normative scale. It also underlines the primarily hybrid character of the norms that apply to it, hence a pendulum movement, with a more or less pronounced oscillation between these different sources. Directed towards the necessity of achieving effective norms, this pendulum movement is however inclined to be stabilized under the effect of co-regulation and compliance. Though they are recipients of the norm and rely on a logic of adherence as well as a logic of accountability, private powers are also in a position as co-creators of the rule of law and they are responsible for its application. Within globalization, the diversified and hybrid character of CSR norms willingly welcomes the recourse to compliance that current European and French norms bring into focus.