The Private Provision of Public Goods: Corporate Commitments and the United Nations

We examine the commitments of transnational corporations to human rights, labor, environmental, and anti-corruption standards. Modeling commitment as a function of the nature of the firm’s business activities and conditioned by neighborhood and audience contexts, we investi-gate adherence to the principles entailed in the UN Global Compact program by the world’s 2000 largest companies. Our results suggest that the decisions to participate in and to take steps to comply with the Glo-bal Compact are influenced by the characteristics of the firm as it adapts to its institutional and political environment. Signing up to the program increases the likelihood of firms developing human rights-related company policies and receiving positive external assessments of their performance. Ten years ago, the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), Kofi Annan, launched the UN Global Compact at the World Economic Forum. Described as the world’s largest global citizenship initiative (United Nations 2007a:6), its aim is to persuade the world’s largest corporations to voluntarily support human rights, follow good labor practices, protect the environment, and fight corrup-tion. With considerable variation across industries and countries, firms have accepted this invitation to participate in a global version of ‘‘the private provi-sion of public goods’ ’ (Baron 2009). There has been progress on the puzzle of why firms adopt corporate social responsibility measures and international volun