Synthesising Synergies between Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Human Rights for Corporate Accountability: Microfoundations for an Integrated Approach

Although an emerging literature considers CSR as obligatory, the effect of voluntarism has dominated the scholarship and policymaking related to CSR leading to a significant corporate accountability gap. Almost parallel to this literature, the field of Law has conceived and advanced the concept of Business and Human Rights (BHR). This thesis highlights compelling gaps in scholarship at the intersection of the fields of CSR, BHR, and Law to make novel contributions. These gaps include the absence of consensus on what should constitute CSR, its relationship with BHR and corporate accountability, the limitations of the current regulatory approaches, and the absence of a strong international regulatory framework for corporate accountability across borders. The thesis develops four new frameworks for corporate accountability. Offering a radically new approach to the conceptualisation of CSR obligations, the first framework reconstrues CSR in the form of business relation and impact relation, and demonstrates that CSR is intertwined with legal responsibilities of business and with accountability. By constructing the boundaries of CSR, it proposes a new foundation for CSR regulation. The second framework integrates the fields of CSR and BHR. It offers a taxonomy of CSR-BHR strategies that firms can select from to optimise the impact of their CSR-BHR activities through prioritisation while providing a basis for consistent policymaking across the world. For the international context, the third framework facilitates access to justice to victims of corporate abuse by reconstruing the principle of forum necessitatis as consisting of mandatory forum necessitatis and contextual necessitatis. The final framework examines the role of reflexive law, inventive interventionism, and legal transplants for the development of global CSR policy framework. In the process, the thesis makes substantial contributions to the scholarship on CSR, BHR and Law to offer unique resolutions to long-standing issues at the intersection of these fields for corporate accountability.