1.1.5 The European Commission’s second CSR Communication (22nd of March of 2006)

Following the outcomes of the European Multi-stakeholder Forum in 2004 and the re-launch of the Lisbon strategy in 2005, the European Commission renewed the CSR policy and published its second Communication on CSR to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee, on the 22nd March 2006. The communication is entitled “Implementing the partnership for growth and jobs: making Europe a pole of excellence on Corporate Social Responsibility”. In this document the European Commission, comes back to the initial idea put forward by the first CSR Communication of the 2nd of July of 2002. In the second CSR Communication, the European Commission continues favoring a voluntary approach to CSR, promoting CSR “as a voluntary concept, with an emphasis on dialogue between stakeholders.”1 The European Commission clarifies that CSR practices, “(…) are not a substitute for public policy, but they can contribute to a number of public policy objectives…”, here coming back to its primary idea expressed in 2001 in the Green Paper and later deleted in 2002 in the first communication on CSR.2

However, the European Commission continues not pushing organizations further than the minimum legal requirements and it will not be able to monitor CSR progress and certainly not pursue accountability for not delivering. This can be extracted from the introductory paragraph of the second communication on page 2: “Because CSR is fundamentally about voluntary business behavior, an approach involving additional obligations and administrative requirements for business risks being counter-productive and would be contrary to the principles of better regulation.” When referring to the outcomes of the European Multistakeholder Forum, the European Commission informs that regarding company reporting requirements and the need for European standards on CSR, no consensus was reached.