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This chapter centers on the global leadership of enterprises and their strategic business decisions as they interact with intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in constructing a supranational global governance regime to address complex global issues. As the world faces myriad issues that transcend state borders, negative externalities of globalization, such as climate change and pandemics, are straining the current system and threatening vulnerable populations. To better understand how firms address these challenges, we present a stakeholder framework involving multinational enterprises (MNEs) in a supranational context and examine their relationships with IGOs, international nongovernmental organizations, and NGOs. A typology of firm behavior is introduced to describe four strategic responses to increased pressure for corporate social responsibility that represent the extent to which firms take leadership roles. Case studies illustrate each of the four archetypes, namely the collaborator, the complier, the counteractor, and the combatant. The situational strength of global governance organizations can have an influence on which strategic response MNEs choose, and ultimately on how MNEs decide to engage in socially responsible behaviors. The interrelatedness of MNEs and global governance organizations will continue to grow as humankind grapples with complex global issues that threaten our way of life. The 4 Cs of MNE strategic responses inform how firms may choose to respond to these challenges.

To address the grand challenge of refugee workforce integration, a multistakeholder approach which incorporates contributions from governmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, media, educational institutions, researchers, and the corporate sector, is vital. This chapter provides an overarching understanding of how various stakeholders influence refugee integration and how they can assist employers in promoting the cause.

The United Nations Global Compact is a voluntary initiative in four areas as human rights, labor, environment, and anticorruption with 10 universal principles. This network brings corporations, nongovernmental organizations, employees, and people together. There is a need to have responsible and committed leaders to promote good corporate citizenship in the framework of Global Compact. Leaders have a unique position through which they can influence factors concerning organizations’ and employees’ behavior. According to the areas of UN Global Compact, some leadership styles seem to better suit to benefit economies, societies, markets, and people all over the world than the others. By this way, from the theoretical perspectives, the primary purpose of this chapter is to investigate the leader’s behavior and different leadership styles in organizations that are the part of Global Compact platform. There are certain leadership theories – transactional, transformational, sustainable, ethical, and servant – which are examined in Global Compact initiatives.

An extensive literature research is conducted in order to understand the different types of leadership styles while organizations are adapting and understanding the Global Compact principles.

Modern leadership styles especially ethical leadership behavior should be effective to comply with universal principles and organizations can also have commitment to disclose a report with powerful leadership.

However, this research is a theoretical study; for further studies, longitudinal studies can be conducted to understand the leadership styles from the perspective of Global Compact principles, and these different managers’ behaviors can be measured.

This study may be useful for the board of directors and managers since they should participate and adapt themselves to this initiative about how they should behave in the right way.

There is a lack of behavioral studies while analyzing Global Compact principles. Especially examining leadership theories that are complied with these principles will add a value to the literature in this area.

In this chapter we discuss how, as a tool for organizational change, action research can affect the development of cooperation between a traditional university and the external environment. The case analyzed was a two-year action research project carried out in cooperation with over 20 employers. This project was carried out at multiple levels and had several essential goals. Apart from its emancipatory role in the shift in the way students carry out their master's theses (toward application, implementation, where organizations become the research subject instead of the research object), the project's aim was to open up the university to cooperation with its environment and conduct useful research. The results indicate that action research through the democratization of the process of introducing changes and its bottom-up nature influences the development of real cooperation between the university and external organizations. Additionally, they contribute to the emancipation of university knowledge, its democratization, dehierarchization, as well as cocreation and sharing with cooperating organizations.

The nature of the collaborations that exists among the organizations in the climate change and agriculture sectors can influence the tailoring of climate forecasts into information useable for adapting agricultural practices to the risks posed by climate change. Also, the extent to which farmers are integrated into this organizational collaboration network can influence their access to climate information. This paper aims to examine how organizational collaborations in the process of climate information generation and dissemination acts as either barriers or enablers of farmers’ access to and use of climate information in Ghana.

This study used key informant interview and questionnaire survey to interview the organizations in the climate change and agriculture sectors. Using network analysis as an analytical framework, the authors estimated the networks’ core-periphery, density, reciprocity and degree centrality.

The authors observed that communication of climate information to farmers is mostly influenced by the collaborations between governmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations. Nevertheless, information flow and exchange through organizational collaboration network is having limited effect on improving farmers’ knowledge about climate risks, impacts and available risk response options. This is mostly because the feedback flow of information from farmers to national level organizations has not been effective in addressing localized climate/agro challenges.

This paper provides a critical overview of key issues in influencing the relevancy and usefulness of climate information in the Ghanaian agriculture sector. Insights gained and recommendations made are essential for deploying effective climate services in Ghana and can be relevant for many African countries because of similar socioeconomic contexts.

This chapter reviews the changing contours of education governance in today’s global environment in which governments participate in different educational agreements across various levels (supranational and global) or what is identified as the rise of “educational multistakeholderism.” Methodologically it draws up discursive evidence from previous studies in the form of a content analysis to show how the expansion of international regimes (institutions) into new issue areas, such as education, creates an overlap between the elemental (core) regime and other regimes. In exploring how regime theory has been applied to comparative and international education, this chapter draws attention to how new regimes and institutions arise and coexist alongside two or more classes (civil society, nongovernmental, intergovernmental, businesses, and state) of actors and its consequences for education governance. It suggests that regime complex(es) in education, which aims to facilitate educational cooperation and are composed of assemblages from several other regimes, are responsible for governing, steering, and coordinating education governance activities through the use of agreements, treaties, global benchmarks, targets, and indicators. It concludes by suggesting that regimes and regime complex(es) in education are constituted by different types of multistakeholder governance.

It has been more than 20 years since the idea of binding multinational corporations directly to international law was abandoned. Since then, concerned actors have sought to manage corporate conduct through voluntary regulation. However, little is known about the instruments produced in this regard. This study aims to understand the properties of the instruments that govern or regulate corporate social responsibility at the international level.

Systematic literature review and content analysis methods were combined to compile a list of 229 international corporate social responsibility instruments (ICSRIs) produced by intergovernmental (IGOs) and international nongovernmental (INGOs) organizations. These instruments were categorized according to an adapted classification framework.

The majority of instruments from our sample are produced by INGOs, focus on management activities and are applicable to specific industries. The most common issues addressed by the instruments are related to worker protection, human rights, governance and the environment. A limited number of instruments specify stakeholders’ involvement or feature an external orientation. Instruments rarely address issues related to product quality and safety, economic contribution or social performance.

Without a comprehensive overview, it has been difficult to develop broad-based understandings about voluntary regulation as a mechanism for controlling corporate conduct internationally. This study’s findings offer valuable insights, allowing policymakers and industry practitioners to understand the effectiveness of, and make appropriate enhancements to, ICSRIs.

By enhancing ICSRIs to address the limitations highlighted in the current study, multinational corporations can be induced into contributing more productively to the sustainable development of the societies they impact and play a greater role in the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Previous research has largely concentrated on analyzing small numbers of carefully selected instruments in a conceptual or descriptive approach. In contrast, this study represents a novel approach of systematic compilation and quantitative classification for a comprehensive list of ICSRIs.

The way in which the international teacher organizations evolved suggests both the advantages and the difficulties of maintaining a coherent and purposeful international organization for education advocacy (the abbreviations and acronyms for all the organizations are spelled out for reference in Appendix A to this chapter; the complex succession of organizations is traced in a table, presented as Appendix B to this chapter). The international teacher organizations began at the outset of the 20th century in Europe.¹ The first of these, founded in 1905 and centering on the concerns of primary school teachers, was the International Bureau of Federations of Teachers (IBFT; it became the International Federation of Teachers’ Associations [IFTA] in 1926). The second, founded in 1912, was the International Foundation of Secondary Teachers (known by its French acronym, FIPESO, the Fédération internationale des professeurs de l’enseignement secondaire officielle).