The rhetoric of corporate environmental responsibility has been quite positive in industrialized countries, and has even extended to developing countries, but very little is known about the extent of concrete changes in the environmental performance of big business. Through this pioneering set of studies which provide hard data on corporate environmental records, the author asserts that if sustainable development is to become a reality, then transnational corporations must take their environmental responsibilities seriously.
Peter Utting is a project coordinator at the United Nations resesarch Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva.