Governing Externalities: The Potential of Reflexive Corporate Social Responsibility

Externalities occur where an economic actor takes a decision which results in actions that affect other parties without their consent. In most cases, the creator of the externality will be a corporation because they are the most important actors in modern economies. There is a market failure as the corporation obtains all the benefits of the activity but does not bear all the costs. Since Ronald Coase's seminal work, economists have generally argued that externalities should be dealt with either by instrumental regulation or by bargaining between the creator and victim. The regulator should choose between these two options on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. In particular, the costs associated with government intervention should be compared with the transaction costs confronting parties where they attempt to deal with the externality by means of a contract. Most economists assume regulatory costs (including the costs of producing and enforcing regulation and the distortions of economic activity to which it gives rise) will be very high, so the 'cure' of regulation will normally be worse than the 'disease' of externalities, making government intervention undesirable from an efficiency standpoint. This makes them sanguine about leaving many, or even most, externalities to the market, even though its failure led to the externality in the first place. They then assume that if the parties fail to reach agreement on a solution to a particular externality, this will be for transaction costs reasons, so leaving the externality where it falls is the most efficient outcome in the circumstances. This paper argues that neither of these methods offers a wholly adequate way of dealing with externalities in a globalised economy characterised by factually and technologically complex chains of causation. As is widely recognised by sociologists as well as economists, instrumental regulation faces massive difficulties in dealing with externalities. It can also be argued that transaction costs are not the only barrier to bargaining. The result is that many externalities go uncorrected, and it cannot simply be assumed that this is an efficient outcome. The paper then argues that this governance 'gap' could be filled by the doctrine of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), but only if two conditions are met. First, CSR must be understood as corporations voluntarily taking responsibility for, or internalising, the externalities their operations create. This requires corporate decision-makers to change the frames they use so as to take account of the costs their activities create. Second, corporations must be steered towards a socially adequate identification and internalisation of those costs by the careful use of procedural, or reflexive, regulation. A reflexive regulatory approach to CSR would require corporations to meet with those who consider themselves affected in order to construct the 'facts' about the externality, and then require corporate decision-makers to internalise that externality in a manner which is acceptable to all concerned. This would arguably result in many externalities being identified and corrected in a cost-effective way, and should be considered as an alternative or complement to other methods of governing externalities.