Sustainable good governance and corporations: an analysis of asymmetries

The article seeks to examine critically the asymmetries related to the place and role of corporations in sustainable good governance. The primary objective is to assert that existing scholarship on corporate social responsibility has not paid adequate attention to these asymmetries. Consequently, the project of injecting social responsibility into the working of corporations has not made much progress. This article explored how two paradigms -- the prisoner's dilemma and goodwillnomics -- offer competing, perhaps opposing, economic rationales for whether corporations should assume their responsibilities toward sustainable good governance or not. This article has also suggested some measures to rectify these asymmetries: corporations have to reexamine and reorient their role in the project of sustainable good governance. Even though corporations have been, and continue to be, part of the problem, they also possess the capacity to become part of the solution. However, it is necessary that both legal regimes and societal constituents offer incentives to corporations for acting as good corporate citizens.