The Struggle for Legitimacy in Environmental Standards Systems: The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises

摘要

The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises is one among several systems of guidelines that purport to provide standards of social and environmental responsibility for multinational enterprises. Each of these systems has attempted to strike a balance that will allow it to gain acceptance across a wide swath of affected interests. Such balancing could be viewed simplisticaliy as finding a balance between strict standards that gain approval of NGOs but hold very little hope for compliance, and loose standards that are widely complied with but have minimal impact. Though this calculus does come into play, in reality a more complicated balancing occurs along multiple axes, with the position of a regime along the various axes affecting the position it can take with regards to an issue, and vice versa. While OECD Guidelines have never been referred to as "cutting-edge," this Article shows how the position of the regime along the several axes - including, perhaps counter-intuitively, an extremely weak enforcement mechanism and a lack of central control and consistency - have allowed the Guidelines system to take a surprisingly radical position on one substantive issue in particular: supply chain responsibility.