Corporate Social Responsibility in the Netherlands

Corporate social responsibility has a somewhat unique character in The Netherlands due to the characteristics of the Netherlands’ culture and business climate. Still many developments are comparable to what happened in other Western European countries. The development of CSR, despite its roots in the early twentieth century, largely took off in the 1970s and gained momentum with the development of the sustainability movement in the 1990s. Societal developments and trends in the business world were the main contributors to this. For different types of organisations, the awareness of CSR manifested itself in different ways. This was strengthened by the activities of NGOs, which are exceptionally receiving support from Netherlands’ society, and by the active involvement of the Netherlands government, which founded and kept supporting a separate organisation for the encouraging CSR in the Netherlands business community. The following text is divided into ten sections, which diverge in length due to the nature of their contents. After the introduction, Section 2 discusses what ‘CSR’ means in The Netherlands, after which Section 3 describes relevant characteristics of The Netherlands and Section 4 gives historical developments behind the reality of CSR in The Netherlands. Then, Section 5 discusses global developments that have been relevant to CSR in The Netherlands, with specific attention to these developments; in Section 6 the chapter explores developments around Codes of Conduct and Corporate Values Statements. Section 7 focuses on political and societal developments that have impacted on how companies’ responsibilities are perceived in The Netherlands. In Section 8 is the largest chapter which consists of case studies on a number of companies, ranging from cooperatives to family-owned businesses, from SMEs to large multinationals. This largest section is devoted to Royal Dutch/Shell, as this is a company that lends itself to many interesting lessons. The next Section 9 is much smaller, discussing issues like the roles of academia and of the NGOs. Finally, Section 10 concludes the chapter.