Addressing Gender Inequality Through Corporate Social Responsibility: A Review of Public Governance in Latin America

The role of public governance institutions has been largely associated with the enactment of laws regulating business behaviour. However, the State capacity to enforce those laws is frequently limited. Public governance has evolved to include policy tools and standards to promote responsible business conduct that go beyond traditional legislation. Those policy tools are frequently regarded as corporate social responsibility or CSR. While CSR involves the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable development in a win-win relationship with society, building optimal enabling conditions for business involvement is one of the main challenges of global and domestic governance institutions. The purpose of this chapter is to explore what public governance strategies have been used to engage the private sector in gender equality issues. We focus on identifying international public governance initiatives. We map international public policy efforts with emphasis in Latin America by analysing the data gathered from 115 reports published between January 2010 to October 2014 by 19 international, regional, and sub-regional organisations. Furthermore, this chapter explores the role of local governments at engaging the private sector. Through ten semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from multilateral organisational and employers’ associations, the role of governments and the involvements of the private sector are identified and discussed.