The chapter uses global poverty as a case study subset of human rights to expand the smart-mix regulation discourse to the field of human rights where there is little legal affirmation of the methods for tackling challenges. It shows how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) exemplify governance reluctance and uncertainties in international human rights law. It argues that, if properly designed, corporate social responsibility (CSR) can potentially address governance gaps for human rights beyond the scope of the UNGPs. The chapter further shows that CSR can be utilised by willing actors for safeguarding rights and combating the unwillingness of powerful political and economic entities to accept the legalisation of business responsibility for human rights.

This chapter focuses on the critical corporate governance role of outsiders providing professional advisory services in promoting corporate social responsibility (CSR). It draws on insights from responsive regulation and institutional theories to make the case for including professional advisory services such as accounting and auditing firms, management consultancies, rating agencies, external company secretaries, and public relations, advertising and marketing firms in the CSR legal infrastructure. Proposing an inclusive and limited stakeholder approach, the chapter outlines creative ways for enabling the CSR responsibility, accountability and transparency of professional advisory services.

Increasing regulatory oversight to control shareholders is bound to underperform. This is because it rests on an invalid assumption, namely that shareholders are better controlled and better steered when regulatory stringency is increased. The assumption runs counter to the conditions that a regulation must require of shareholders, owing to those conditional requirements being unevenly matched by shareholders. Specifically, since shareholders vary in what is required of them by a regulation, the increase of regulatory oversight necessitates that some shareholders will fail to respond, some will comply with what is required, and others will do more. Increasing regulatory oversight does not therefore address the fundamental problem of there being pre-existing deficiencies in stakeholder capacities to comply. To better address the problem, a minmax approach to regulation is proposed. The main benefit of minmax is that it aligns itself to shareholder differences, helping to reduce non-compliance while simultaneously encouraging beyond-compliance behaviour.

This chapter introduces the book and its inspiration, mission, central research questions and structure. It links the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to better understanding of its interdependent relationship with law, regulation and governance. The chapter shows that the book is unconstrained by conventional understandings and the neo-liberal voluntarism orthodoxy of some disciplines in suggesting opportunities for tackling substantive and procedural barriers for CSR in public international law, private international law and national law. It underlines the need for contextualism and a spectrum for possible legal and regulatory intermediation in fifteen ingredients of CSR.

The concluding chapter contextualises the book within some problematic questions on business and social responsibility, particularly from multijurisdictional and globalisation perspectives. It traces the origin and evolution of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and explains the emergence and role of law, regulation, governance and policy as an antithesis to the fundamental voluntary and market-based notion of CSR. The chapter notes that there are unexplored questions even though CSR and regulation have met particularly through smart-mix or smart-regulation discourse.