SUMMARY
Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken
meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while
corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental
quality, they are ignored in most current sustainability metrics. It is time for these
metrics to be expanded to critically assess firms based on the sustainability impacts
of their public policy positions. To enable such assessments, firms must become as
transparent about their corporate political responsibility (CPR) as their corporate social
responsibility (CSR). For their part, rating systems must demand such information
from firms and include evaluations of corporate political activity in their assessments
of corporate environmental responsibility.
KEYWORDS : sustainability , lobbying , corporate social responsibility , business &
society , business-government relations , policy making , non-market strategy
C orporate sustainability—once viewed as utopian, irrelevant, or
even subversive—has gone mainstream. Of the Fortune 500
global companies, four-fifths now issue sustainability reports,
describing a wide variety of environment-friendly activities. 1 Most
leading business schools have courses in corporate sustainability, if not fullfledged dual-degree programs aiming to create a sustainable world “through the
power of business.” Support for corporate sustainability comes from both ends