JR Centre for Collective Action and Responsible Partnerships

This JR Centre explores collaborative, long-term cooperation between companies and other stakeholders to solve social and environmental problems.

What drives companies to engage in partnerships, multi-stakeholder initiatives or other forms of collaboration? What factors support companies in collaborative projects? How must collaboration be organised in order to achieve the desired results? How can the success of collaborations be measured and where do they derive their moral legitimacy? These and similar questions are the subject of the JR Centre.

Today, global society is faced with major social challenges such as resource scarcity, social inequality and the climate crisis. Companies are increasingly called upon to actively address these challenges. Previous strategic approaches to corporate responsibility, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability management, place responsibility with individual companies and are therefore not effective enough to effectively address global social challenges. Both specialist literature and supranational organisations such as the United Nations or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development cite collective action initiatives as a promising approach to achieving social and environmental objectives.

Collective action initiatives can be divided into regulatory and implementation initiatives. Regulatory initiatives aim to close regulatory gaps - for example by creating industry codes, certifiable standards or legally binding agreements. Such initiatives already exist, e.g. in the areas of clothing production, fishing, forestry, the financial and IT industries, with resulting codes of conduct or certification programmes. In implementation initiatives, which are often referred to as partnerships, companies and stakeholders join forces to solve a problem (e.g. shortage of skilled workers, energy supply, digitalisation) that is usually local in nature. These two types of corporate cooperation are being researched here.

This makes a decisive contribution to scientific research into corporate cooperation, while at the same time the centre is a competent point of contact for companies and stakeholders for questions relating to operational practice. Together with contacts from politics, science, non-governmental organisations and public agencies, application-oriented knowledge and innovative frameworks are developed for managers, political decision-makers and other stakeholders.