Regulating Multinationals in Developing Countries

Book excerpt: Edwin Mujih explores the difficulties associated with regulating multinational companies operating in developing countries, with a particular focus on extractive industries. The author highlights the need to establish an international legally binding framework to ensure that multinationals operate in a socially responsible manner to protect local communities and the environment. Edwin Mujih’s analysis reveals that the existing mechanisms for controlling the behaviour of huge multinational entities are of normative force only, that these are particularly inadequate, and that the notion of corporate social responsibility is only meaningful where behaviour can be legally regulated. Regulating Multinationals in Developing Countries features a study of the Chad and Cameroon Oil and pipeline project, which highlights the problems arising in countries that have neither the capacity nor the will to effectively regulate those operating within their borders. The author has evaluated compliance by the parties with their social and environmental obligations. He has found that, despite controversy surrounding inadequate regulation of this project in its incipient stages, the system that was put in place following huge opposition from the affected communities and from NGOs is worthy of attention and could stand as a model for similar projects elsewhere. This first title in Gower's Corporate Social Responsibility Series to approach CSR from a legal perspective provides insight not just into the complexity surrounding efforts to regulate multinationals operating in countries with weak regulatory regimes, but also into the fundamental nature of multinational corporations and the debate about different notions of CSR itself.