REbalancing disruptive Business of multinAtional corporations and gLobal value chAins within democratic and iNClusive citizEnship processes

The objective of this Report is to provide a comprehensive literature review on the mutual relationship between business organizations and democracy, drawing from management, business ethics, sociology, international law, and other relevant disciplines mastered by the project’s partners. The interdisciplinary review serves first to provide the understanding of previous research on how democratic institutions regulate economic actors, how economic actors, especially large multinational corporations (MNCs) resist such regulation, and how they develop behaviors and economic models that challenge democratic governance, such as business-related human rights violations. In the first part of the review, we focus on the past and present of the business-democracy nexus. Further, the Report explores how companies can build a better future for democracy by filling the voids left by governments that do not protect citizens’ rights, as in the case of populist governments, and also by developing alternative business models, such as social enterprises (SEs) and cross-sector partnerships, as well as by contributing to democratic governance and promoting participatory 4 principles. The last section of the Report undertakes a bibliometric analysis (co-authorship, co-citation and keyword co-occurrence maps) based on key references used by team members as part of their literature reviews. This is meant to examine the connections existing among the different strands of research underpinning each RQ of the Rebalance Project.