Multinational Business Entities and their Role in the Global Environmental, Social, and Governance Architecture

In the last decade, a remarkable regulatory shift has taken multinational corporations (“MNCs”) by surprise. There is a concerted effort at national, bilateral, and multilateral levels to make MNCs part of the solution of the global environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) agenda rather than odd outliers and part of the problem. This article suggests that this process is predicated on three broad tiers: a) at the national level, many liberal states are adopting extra-territorial corporate legislation, even if it is confined to specific areas of operations; b) at the bilateral level, this process is achieved by a purposive ESGbased interpretation of existing bilateral investment treaties (“BITs”); c) finally, at the multilateral level there is a clear abandonment of the corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) paradigm (at least as a key solution) in favor of more ESG commitments in the new generation of free trade agreements (“FTAs”), all of which are subsequently incorporated in corporate commitments through legislative implementation.