Environmental Accountability and Transnational Corporations

Abstract

At the start of the twenty-first century most foreign-based transnational corporations (TNCs) have more power over governments than do the citizens of the countries where they invest. With the growth over the past three decades of corporate power — described by Vidal as the consequence of ‘corporate globalism’, an ideological challenge to social welfarism (1997a), and by Korten as ‘corporate libertarianism’, where the rights and liberties of corporations are placed ahead of those of individual citizens (1995: 74) — the task of bringing corporations under democratic control is one of the most pressing challenges for global governance in the twenty-first century.