The United Nations Global Compact: Retrospect and Prospect

This article provides a review of the UN Global Compact, discussing its impact on corporate social responsibility and the opportunities and constraints it presents for organizations. It highlights the potential of the Global Compact to generate a large-scale impact due to its geographic reach, political backing, and moral legitimacy.

Business and Government in Globe
Context

Introduction
The title of the article which is to be reviewed is “The United Nations Global Compact:
Retrospect and Prospect”, which is written by Rasche, Waddock and McIntosh in the year
2012. The article presents a review of the interdisciplinary literature provided on the UN
Global Compact. This can be considered to be a good initiative by the companies as well as
the UN, as it promotes the idea of abiding by the universal principles of UN, based on labour
rights, human rights, anticorruption and the environmental protection.
Discussion
This can be considered to be an effective initiative taken by the UN to manage the
implications of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for the organizations. It is the
largest initiate for voluntary corporate responsibility across the world and about 10,000 non-
business and business participants are a part of this initiative. The review identifies three
different perspectives of research – a historical perspective which discuses the Global
Compact as a function of the UN business relations; an operational perspective which
discusses the impact and composition of the participants of this Compact; and the governance
perspective which discusses the opportunities and constraints of the initiative for addressing
the gaps in the governance of the organizations pertaining to the CSR. In the end, it
summarises these perspectives based on the studies conducted by different researchers in the
space (Rasche et al., 2012).
This initiative has been well accepted by the member nations and thus, it can prove to be an
effective measure for establishing the CSR practices. However, there have been many such
initiatives taken by different authorities in the space, but the UN Global Compact has the
potential to generate a better and large scale impact due to its high geographic reach, political
backing of the initiative by 193 member states and the moral legitimacy (Schembera, 2018).

The most valuable characteristic of the Global Impact Initiative is the fact that it functions at
two different but interrelated levels – the global level and the local level across 99 different
nations. The historical perspective of the Initiative is designed in a way that it gives a “human
face to the global market” (Ruggie, 2012). Initially, it was designed for monitoring the CSR
impact within transnational corporations (TNCs) and later, it was implemented across the
organizations of all nations to develop sustainable markets based on the UN agenda for
human rights. The operational perspective focuses on motivating the firms in the member
nations to join the Global Impact initiative and measure the impact of participation on
business strategies and operations of these firms. The operational perspective has been given
the prime importance by other researchers as well as the implementation of the guidelines
laid by UN is totally based on it. The governance perspective is also important and linked to
the operational perspective as, the Initiative can be implemented by the organization only
when the governance allows it to be implemented proactively (Brown et al., 2018).
Conclusion
Thus, it can be said that UN Global Compact can be considered to be the CSR milestone for
the organizations and the best part about this initiate is that it contains guidelines for all
governmental and non-governmental organizations to meet the same CSR objectives.
References
Brown, J.A., Clark, C. & Buono, A.F., 2018. The United Nations global compact: Engaging
implicit and explicit CSR for global governance. Journal of Business Ethics, 147(4), pp.721-
34.
Rasche, A., Waddock, S. & McIntosh, M., 2012. The United Nations global compact:
Retrospect and prospect. Business & Society, 52(1), pp.6-30.
Ruggie, J.G., 2012. The theory and practice of learning networks: corporate social
responsibility and the Global Compact. Journal of Corporate Citizenship, (5), pp.27-36.

Schembera, S., 2018. Implementing corporate social responsibility: Empirical insights on the
impact of the UN Global Compact on its business participants. Business & Society, 57(5),
pp.783-825.