Facilitating Corporate Social Responsibility through Company Law: A Middle-Ground Proposition for Kuwait.

This thesis investigates the question of whether mandatory compliance or voluntary ‘‘comply or explain’’ enforcement is a more effective regulatory approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and whether regulation creates a hierarchy to enable prioritisation of stakeholder interests. There is a lack of consensus on whether corporations should be subject to CSR obligations. CSR concepts encourage the identification of specific core CSR categories such as ethical, legal, economic, social and environmental responsibilities and obligations. The Indian and UK contexts exemplify a variety of CSR-related legislative provisions enacted to underscore the importance of a company’s stakeholder obligations and responsibilities that extend beyond its corporate constituencies. However, the current CSR jurisprudence is carefully evaluated in Kuwaiti company law given the lack of CSR-related legislative provisions in the country. There is a need to explore and analyse these areas in different contexts, such as CSR in UK and Indian company laws, to form the basis of potential CSR provisions and legal vision for Kuwaiti company law. The current study uses Kuwait as a case to determine the ideal regulatory model for the country, whether CSR adherence is more likely to be mandatory (prescriptive) as demonstrated in Indian company law or voluntary (self-regulation) as demonstrated in UK company law and which builds the foundation of a middle ground approach. This is further supported by middle ground components of contextualism, constructivism, legal transplants and institutional theory.