Sustainable Development Diplomacy in the Private Business Sector: An Integrative Perspective on Game Change Strategies at Multiple Levels

In: International negotiation: a journal of theory and practice, Band 8, Heft 2, S. 267-310

Abstract

AbstractThis article attempts to offer an "integral" perspective for locating the business and industry sector in both political and socio-organizational realms and for capturing major game change strategies envisaged by this sector to contribute more or less actively to emerging sustainable development (SD) regimes. Corporate SD strategies are construed in terms of "three-level games": Level I - changing products through individual management systems; Level II - changing individual business environments; and Level III - changing the international institutional setting. This perspective will help address two overarching preoccupations: (1) how to free the business-society relationship from excess structural biases and reconstruct it through industry and other major social actors engaged in a joint process of "structuration" and (2) how to harness control over the local-global nexus or "vertical inter-linkages" in an operationally meaningful way that would help deepen and broaden existing major multilateral SD agreements.