The Corporation’s Complicity in the Climate Crisis

Organized by the Max Planck Law Initiative on ‘Law, Climate Change, and the Environment‘ in cooperation with the Initiative ‘Corporate Responsibility | ESG’, this seminar will investigate the role of the regulation of corporations (or absence thereof) in contributing to anthropocentric climate change. The keynote will be held by Joel Bakan, based on his recent publication: ‘Corporate Capitalism’s Moral Lack‘ (2024) 98 Business History Review 301. His presentation will be followed by a comment by Saparya Sood entitled: ‘Leveling the Playing Field or Lowering the Bar? The “New Corporation” in the Age of HRDD Compliance’.

Corporate capitalism changed dramatically in the early 2000s. The 1980s mantra that ‘greed is good’ gave way to corporate vows to pursue social and environmental values alongside profit, with particular emphasis on climate mitigation. The rise of this model, referred to as the ‘new corporation’, purported to answer a question first raised in the nineteenth century: How do we ensure that corporations are accountable for the harm they cause to others? By the late nineteenth century, capitalism had become corporate, and the corporation had become capitalist. This phenomenon created a moral lack in capitalism, which inspired both the ‘new capitalism’ of the 1920s, and the ‘new corporation’, which emerged in the early 2000s (building upon earlier corporate social responsibility movements). Over the last couple years, there has been a backlash against new corporation practices, as major companies retreat from climate and sustainability commitments, and conservatives condemn the undertaking of such commitments in the first place (even making them illegal in some US states). Uniting both the new corporation movement and its critics, however, is a common belief in the illegitimacy of mandatory legal regulation for corporations to secure social and environmental ends, like climate mitigation.

The discussion will followed by a public movie screening of Joel Bakan’s movie: ‘The New Corporation‘ (2020). The screening will take place at the Kamera Cinema (Brückenstraße 26, Heidelberg 69120) at 8pm, as part of the recently established cooperation between Kamera and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law: ‘International Law and Popcorn‘. Following the movie Professor Bakan will discuss the movie with Matthias Goldmann (EBS University) as well as with the public.

To register, please email Moritz Vinken:  vinken@mpil.de

Joel Bakan is a Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. He has law degrees from Oxford, Dalhousie, and Harvard. In 2003, he published The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,which received critical acclaim, was widely translated, and became a bestseller in several countries. The book inspired a feature documentary film: ‘The Corporation’ (2003), written by Professor Bakan and co-created with Mark Achbar. The film, also widely translated, won numerous awards, including best foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2020 co-directors Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott released the sequel documentary ‘The New Corporation’.

Saparya Sood is a research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for research on collective goods. Saparya obtained her bachelor in Business Administration and Law in India, and thereafter worked in Indian law firms as a corporate lawyer. She completed her (European) Master’s in Law and Economics (EMLE) in 2021 from the University of Hamburg (Germany), Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands) and University of Vienna (Austria). She is also one of the co-organizers of the Max Planck Law Initiative on ‘Corporate Responsibility | ESG’.