Paper Titles & Abstracts

Governance can be understood as the wide range of institutions, interventions and influences that conspire to govern or shape behaviour. Governance can be seen as a multi-level, multi-actor process that extends beyond the boundaries of government, where interactions between influences emerging from the global, regional, national and local scales, and from public, private and civic actors, conspire to change behaviour and/or shape outcomes. This paper focuses on the question of how corporations are governed, and how these governance processes have changed over the past decade. The past decade have seen governments move away from traditional forms of regulation, with many governments seeking to influence business through the creation of incentives or the provision of information rather than the imposition of controls. This has contributed to a proliferation of private standards bodies and initiatives, the emergence of new forms of business-to-business regulation have emerged, and self-regulation becoming an increasingly important part of the regulatory toolkit. This paper describes the evolution of these governance processes. Using the case of corporate responses to climate change, it considers how corporations perceive and respond to these new forms of governance and assesses the contribution these non-regulatory governance interventions can make to reducing the negative impacts or maximising the positive activities of corporate activities.