The Corporate Citizen: Friend or foe of sustainable development?

Abstract

Will corporations help or hinder efforts to achieve sustainable development? This question is addressed by working through the three main kinds of business responses to environmental risks that have been identified by Doyle and McEachern ‐ rejection, accommodation and environmental. This paper links these categories to discursive struggle between neo‐liberalism, weak and strong ecological modernisation respectively using examples from the USA, UK and Australia. It is argued that knowledge and discourses have a significant impact on the stance adopted by firms and on their capacity for change. This in turn has a major effect on the ability of the state to implement environmental policies. These observations are related to the broader concept of reflexive modernisation.