About Chapter 9 by Richard Samans
Download the 28-page PDF from: Brookings or this site
Introduction to Chapter 9
After more than two decades of voluntary, market-led development, corporate sustainability reporting has reached a critical juncture. National regulators and international accounting authorities have begun to act in the coordinated fashion necessary to ensure the comparability and quality of nonfinancial information reported by companies. Their actions over the next few years have the potential to drive the routine internalization of social and environmental externalities in the capital allocation of firms and financial markets, both within and across jurisdictions. In addition, the rise of mandatory sustainability reporting has the potential to increase corporate transparency and accountability to stakeholders. These outcomes have long been the holy grail of the private sector reform sought by activists and many economists and policymakers.
Notwithstanding the recent progress toward mandatory mainstream reporting of sustainability considerations by companies, this journey continues to face considerable challenges. Notable among them is the risk that some national regulators will decide to go their own way and thereby replicate the fragmentation that characterized the competing private voluntary standards their actions were meant to replace. All stakeholders, not least the business community, will need to remain engaged in this process during the next few crucial years in order to avoid such an outcome.
About the whole book
Main Brookings Institution page for the entire book: here
The book For the World’s Profit: How Business Can Support Sustainable Development was edited by: Homi Kharas, Koji Makino, John W. McArthur, and Jane Nelson. The whole book can be downloaded free as a PDF from the Brookings website.
Summary of book from publisher
This book argues that the world is at a key juncture for considering how the targeted pursuit of business profits can better add up to the world’s profit, broadly defined.
The edited volume brings together a remarkable array of distinguished corporate, investor, government, academic, and nonprofit perspectives to reflect on the issues. The authors tackle such questions as how businesses can work more effectively with governments, financial institutions, and civil society to mitigate their own enterprise risk alongside risks to people and planet; how private resources, innovation, and networks can be mobilized to create value in solving major social and environmental challenges; and what types of accountability structures are needed to set boundaries, provide oversight, and create positive incentives for business performance.
Their perspectives offer insights into how sustainability can be introduced into business practices, finance and policymaking in a way that expands market opportunities and accelerates progress toward global sustainable development.