Regulating Multinationals in Developing Countries
A Conceptual and Legal Framework for Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility Series

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.

Edwin Mujih is a senior lecturer in business law at London Metropolitan University Business School in the UK. Dr Mujih gained his first law degree (LLB) in Cameroon. He subsequently gained a master's degree in law from Leicester University; an MPhil. in banking law from Liverpool University; and a PhD from the University of Westminster, all in the UK. He has taught law, including company law for accountants, at Liverpool, Westminster and London Metropolitan Universities and assisted in establishing the Centre for Corporate Responsibility at London Metropolitan University. Dr Mujih is a member of the Social Responsibility Research Network and one of his principal research interests is the regulation of multinational corporations. He has authored numerous articles and conference papers on the subject.