Time for a Reality Check : Is Business Willing to Support a Smart Mix of Complementary Regulation in Private Governance?

In recent years, scholars and policymakers have become interested in the idea of a smart mix of voluntary and regulatory measures in private governance. If public and private actors are to share the work load of governing the commons, this presupposes that both sides can agree on this compromise formula – but can they? So far, we have limited knowledge of firms and business associations' regulatory preferences in this realm. As a ground-clearing exercise my article aims to help fill this gap and expose some of the underappreciated fault and conflict lines within private governance. Its thrust is that existing literature is excessively optimistic about business's willingness to support regulation. The article surveys the EU's non-financial disclosure Directive 2014/95/EU and half a dozen other attempts to regulate CSR or non-financial disclosure across the world (sections 1502 and 1504 of the US Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform Act, South Africa's King Codes, the 2009 2% clause in Mauritius, Section 135 of India's Companies Act 2013, Article 74 of Indonesia's 2007 Companies Law) and finds that public authorities' more ambitious attempts at regulation met with vigorous business opposition. Even after the financial crisis, most business associations and firms reject a smart mix in favor of voluntarism and soft law without hard sanctions.The published PDF version of this article can be accessed via the following link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/BXt52FMJ5hPXtWcAdfMx/fullFor a closely related paper, "The tenuous link between CSR performance and support for regulation: Business associations and Nordic regulatory preferences regarding the corporate transparency law 2014/95/EU" please see http://ssrn.com/abstract=3451630