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Today’s scholarship and policymaking on business and human rights (BHR) urges businesses to better understand their human rights responsibilities and remedy them, when and if abuses do occur. Despite the public discourse about businesses and human rights, the state—as the main duty bearer in international human rights law—plays a fundamental role as the protector and enforcer of human rights obligations. This is a problem because the existing literature overlooks state involvement as perpetrators of abuse in the corporate context. We develop the term economic complicity to shed light on the state’s role in directly or indirectly abusing human rights within a corporation’s sphere of influence, such as police violence toward protests or granting environmental licenses without adhering to legally required community consultations. We ask: What contributes to the state’s engagement in economic complicity in corporate human rights abuses? We assess hypotheses emergent from the democratic change and development studies literatures with a unique database that includes economic complicity data from Latin America, the Corporations and Human Rights Database (CHRD). This research has important theoretical implications for the business ethics and BHR literatures, as understanding economic complicity highlights the need for businesses actors to avoid shirking their moral responsibilities to not only ‘do no harm’ but also to protect human rights when they are threatened by the state.
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Human Rights in the Oil and Gas Industry: When Are Policies and Practices Enough to Prevent Abuse?
Multinational enterprises are aware of their responsibility to protect human rights now more than ever, but severe human rights violations, including physical integrity abuses (e.g., death, torture, disappearances), continue unabated. To explore this puzzle, we engage theoretically with the means-ends decoupling literature to examine if and when oil and gas firms’ policies and practices prevent severe human rights abuse. Using an original dataset, we identify two pathways to mitigate means-ends decoupling: (a) while human rights policies alone do not reduce human rights abuses, firms with a high-quality human rights policy over the long-term reduce severe human rights abuses; (b) firms that combine preparedness—which we define as a firm’s capabilities, practices, and engagement—with a long-term human rights policy also reduce the likelihood of human rights abuses. Preparedness, we argue, can lead to reinforcement dynamics between long-term policy efforts and additional capabilities that provide a more holistic understanding of firm behavior.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1921229
- PAR ID:
- 10284337
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Business & Society
- ISSN:
- 0007-6503
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 000765032110174
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503211017435
