From responsibility to partnership Global corporations, climate change, and the making of international law

While global corporations face increasing criticism for their past and present contributions to climate change, they are still embraced as ‘partners’ under the current climate regime, and holding corporations legally responsible for climate change remains a challenge. Diving into international legal history, however, the direct stipulation of corporate responsibilities was high on the international law-making agenda in the 1970s, as evidenced by efforts to adopt a Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations as part of the Southern states’ struggles towards a ‘New International Economic Order’. This thesis probes into the following research question: how have international legal assumptions about global corporations changed over time, and how have those assumptions interacted with institutional and legal dynamics to reproduce the exclusion of corporate responsibility? Challenging the absence of direct legal responsibilities for global corporations in relation to climate change, it adopts a discourse analysis approach to examine the assumptions about corporations embedded in international legal discourse. Throughout three key formative periods of international legal discourse on corporations in contemporary history (the drafting period of the Code of Conduct; the inauguration of international environmental law and the principle of sustainable development; and the development of the international climate change regime), it shows how assumptions about the benefits of corporations, their public or private status, and their regulation at both international and national levels have been crucial in shaping the discourse and the law-making process. It argues that the international legal discourse on corporate responsibility is key to understanding how economic injustice is reproduced in international law.