Transnational corporations (TNCs) refer to businesses that cross over borders, armed with capital as well as products, processes, marketing methods, trade names, skills, technology, and most importantly management. TNCs have drawn the interest of political scientists and specialists of international relations as they reflect a new, transnational, or even global economic reality. The shift towards trade liberalization and the expansion of market economies have enabled TNCs to grow in size and expand their operations all over the world. Thus, they also affect the natural environment. Three hypotheses or ideas have been put forward by various authors about TNCs’ relationships with the global environment: TNCs as “dirty industries” hypothesis, pollution haven hypothesis, and “business advantage of environmental standards hypothesis.” TNCs are said to operate in some sort of a political and legal vacuum, which they try to shape by defining private environmental standards and at the same time take advantage of this very vacuum to the detriment of the environment. However, they are obliged to deal with other actors such as environmental groups, governments, and consumers. TNCs are engaged in various environmental initiatives and activities relating to environmental protection, including voluntary initiatives, often mandatory environmental reporting, and private certification standards. Given their impact on the environment, it is important to engage TNCs in a global environmental governance processes and for states to adopt restrictive measures and foster international collaboration in order to regulate TNCs which neglect their environmental and social responsibilities.
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Transnational Corporations and the Global Environment
Matthias Finger and David Svarin
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Investment and Transnational Corporations
Jonathan Crystal
Transnational corporations (TNCs) are networks of related enterprises, composed of a parent in one country and subsidiaries or affiliates in other countries. They play a central role in the global economy, and have recently come into focus in international political economy (IPE) scholarship. Early studies on TNCs and foreign direct investment (FDI) took place in the late 1960s and the 1970s. FDIs are a type of cross-border investment in which a resident in one economy establishes a lasting interest in an enterprise in another economy, in order to ensure a significant degree of influence by the direct investor in the management of the direct investment enterprise. Both TNCs and FDIs were controversial in the field, as tensions arose between TNCs and host states and people began to question whether or not FDIs were beneficial for developing countries. By the 1980s and 1990s, the world fell into the grip of financial crisis, and the study of TNCs fell largely into neglect, only to witness a revival during the 2000s. Since then, while the field of IPE has returned to focus its research on FDI, the current literature has taken a different track from the earlier work, and the results have made important contributions to answering questions about the effects of FDI and about what affects firm–state bargaining or the governance of TNCs in the twenty-first century. Too much of the recent literature, however, still focuses narrowly on explaining investment flows.
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Natural Resource Governance in Africa
J. Andrew Grant, Evelyn N. Mayanja, Shingirai Taodzera, and Dawit Tesfamichael
Although Africa is home to an abundant and wide variety of natural resources, both land-based and offshore, the governance of such resources has faced myriad challenges. Mineral and hydrocarbon (oil and gas) resources have often led to the vexing “resource curse” whereby weak institutions, corruption, asymmetrical power structures from local to global levels, and lack of economic diversification result in meager development outcomes and can generate episodes of violent conflict. This has resulted in numerous pledges to improve governance and management of natural resources at all stages of the supply chains, ranging from exploration to extraction to environmental remediation. In turn, global and regional governance initiatives have sought to put these pledges and their constitutive norms into practice in conjunction with varying levels of participation by governments, industry, civil society, and local communities.
