I’m re-reading a paper of mine that has just been published by the International Research Network on Business, Development and Society.

The paper is called “Corporate Social Responsibility: What Next?”, and it looks at the likely impact of the current recession on the practice and shape of corporate social responsibility in years to come.

One blindingly obvious thing that occurred to me as I was writing the paper was that there is a deep mismatch between an insistence that businesses adopt a longer-term time horizon when thinking about ‘the business case’ for corporate social responsibility; and a lack of commensurate pressure on governments to think long-term. Yet it is after all governments, or public policy, which provide a large part of the enabling environment for corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Climate change is the policy agenda that could potentially bring both sets of perspectives together most powerfully. But governments at the Copenhagen Climate Summit failed to rise to the challenge.

If you will forgive the breach of blogging etiquette, I reproduce below a couple of relevant passages from (my own) paper. It was written some little while ago, well before the Copenhagen Climate Summit. You can also download it in full.

“Increasing awareness of climate change has potential to bring an outbreak of longer-term thinking in OECD policy-making as well as more serious efforts to substantially decouple economic growth from intensive fossil fuel consumption. Whilst the obstacles are formidable, one consequence could be that emphasis on  falls away in favour of an increasing focus on the role of business as a vehicle for sustainable development…

…The financial crisis could help to spur more widespread longer-term thinking on the part of governments as they reflect on the extent to which lightly regulated capitalism itself may have been at fault. So too could government worries about the long-term potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change. But the risk, as with the potential impact of the economic recession on CSR more generally, is that quick fixes driven by short-term knee-jerk reactions may instead dominate – leaving CSR in ‘business as usual’ mode.

Governments in OECD countries must lead by example, showing businesses that long-term thinking for sustainable development is not only possible, but desirable for the overall good of society. The forthcoming 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit will be a litmus test; potentially the single most significant action on the part of governments, symbolically and in fact, to generate the kinds of shifts that are needed for ‘unusual business’.

The current economic downturn brings the [business] governance challenge of CSR to the fore. Whether this will be addressed in a narrow way or through a renaissance in interest in the role of public policy in directing business endeavour poses the core question for the next stage in the relationship between business, development and society. Efforts on the part of CSR practitioners and public policy makers to tackle the governance challenge of CSR must themselves emulate the long-term thinking and time horizons that CSR advocates often demand of business.

‘Business as unusual’ must be the goal”.

If governments fail to rise to the challenge we cannot expect CSR to provide a major part of the solution to climate change adaptation and mitigation.

We can hope that some business leaders will continue to do just that; lead the business field; but the real pressure for transformation now must come from ordinary people.

At the risk of sounding glib, ordinary people must demand ‘government unusual’ to ensure that elected representatives value long-term sustainability over short-term economic growth. And elected representatives in turn must make clear demands for business to play a clearly defined and responsible role in the transition to a low carbon economy, and they must find ways of doing so without passing the buck or developing an unhealthy dependency on business leadership for environmental and social change.

This seems to be what some people mean, however unhappy the terminology (personally I dislike it with a vengeance), when they call for governments to tackle climate change on a Rooseveltian ‘war footing’.