The Government’s Role in the Mexican CSR Development. Human Rights, Energy Reform and Social & Environmental Assessments

The development of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Mexico during the last two decades is closely linked to the various initiatives within the business sector. The first organizations that were involved with CSR (in the second half of the decade of 1990) rose as a central objective to integrate the concept of CSR in the sphere of business. During the last ten years the development of CSR in Mexico has taken a greater momentum. It is throughout this period that the Mexican Government has begun to have a most important role in CSR development. About this new role, it must be signaled that the Mexican State has signed two international agreements concerning CSR: the first one of them is the Declaration of Santiago (2013) where Mexico, through the Bilateral Cooperation between the EU and the CELAC, basically promised to realize efforts about the legislation concerning the CSR, as well as in the elaboration of a National Action Plan aligned with the recommendations about CSR that are already contemplated in the majority of the European Union States. The NAPs Draft, according to the Work Group guided by the Ministry of the Interior, was going to be be finished in December 2016, but there has been an important delay. The second major agreement signed by the Mexican State is the implementation of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises for which there is an operational instance at the national level: the National Contact Point created in 2011. In this context, the present paper aims to analyze the new role of the Mexican Government in the development of CSR and the future implications.