Corporate governance as social responsibility: a meta-regulation approach to raise social responsibility of corporate governance in a weak economy

The convergence of corporate social responsibility and corporate governance has changed the mechanism of corporate accountability, which has developed ‘corporate self-regulation’ – a synthesis of governance and responsibility. Unlike the strong economies, however, this convergence has not been so visible in the weak economies, where the civil society groups are unorganized, regulatory agencies are either ineffective or corrupt, and the media and NGOs do not mirror the corporate conscience. In the absence of these non-legal drivers, these economies have to depend on their legal regulation framework for the development of corporate social responsibility. This chapter proposes ‘meta-regulation’ – a comparatively new regulatory approach for this development. Within this approach, different forms of regulations regulate one another; it creates scopes for different actors and factors to work together to reach an objective. This chapter describes how a meta-regulation approach to the corporate laws of these economies could compel the corporate governance to raise the capacity of corporate self-regulation to respond to their social responsibilities. Refereed/Peer-reviewed