Environmental protection in multinational enterprises: a dilemma of globalisation

The discussion about corporate governance in multinational enterprises refers to a social problematic of ground-breaking historical significance, which characterises the contemporary stage of globalisation in general. This problematic consists in the tension of parallel processes of ever-increasing economic interweaving and a dynamic of legal, cultural, and technological homogenisation on the one hand, as well as a series of countervailing developments, disintegrative tendencies, and increasingly porous legal and political structures on the other. As far as the multinationals are concerned, they are perceived by the Third World as an indispensable agent of modernisation, as promoters of global economic integration, and as representatives of the modern technological universe, yet at the same time economic expansion can lead to the result that developing countries are played off against each other, that their steering capacity will be ever more limited, and that existing regulatory gaps and low standards will be used by enterprises to externalise costs and negative outcomes to a great extent. The legal construction of the independently managed subsidiary can be strategically employed to hide behind the sovereignty of the host state and to immunise the parent enterprise against possible legal risks and consequences of damages.

In the absence of a ‘world state’, ‘world government’, or international institutions empowered to define and realise binding minimum standards directly addressed to non-state actors, the question arises whether the existing need of governance can be satisfied, at least in part, through reflexive governance mechanisms, patterns of ‘regulated self-regulation’ on the global level, and new ways of connecting the corporate world and the state-centric world: briefly, through manifestations of what is currently discussed under the catchword ‘global governance’.