Potential mechanisms for the social regulation of economies on global and local scales: an institutional analysis of ESG investment and community renewables

Kazuhiro Okuma ()
Additional contact information
Kazuhiro Okuma: Tohoku University

Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, 2019, vol. 16, issue 2, No 17, 523-541

Abstract: Abstract Under economic globalization, the ruling power of national institutions has been weakened. This poses an important question regarding how social regulation of the economy can be achieved in multilayered spatial scales ranging from local to global. Two recently emerging movements—global ESG investment and local community renewables—warrant attention as potential institutions for such regulation. Drawing on the régulation approach, this article analyzes these two movements to consider their significance and potential. ESG investment, driven by a coalition of NGOs and pension funds, reflects environmental and social concerns in global finance, which is the core of the current finance-led growth regime. Community renewables, meanwhile, by utilizing local natural resources with the participation of the local residents, create businesses that contribute to entrepreneurial regional development, which has been necessary since the end of Fordism. Both of these can be understood as the civil-society-led movements that directly incorporate environmental and social interests into dominant institutional forms under “glocalization.” These two movements can be considered viable, since they are compatible with current growth patterns. However, neither of the movements can achieve transformative changes for sustainability on its own, since each depends on external factors. That said, it is conceivable that individual/local actions and the global competitive environment could interact and produce cumulative change (i.e., coevolve). States will play an important role in this process by advancing such actions through national institutions.

Keywords: Institutional forms; Institutional hierarchy; Spatial scale; Glocalization; ESG investment; Community renewables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B52 Q50 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40844-019-00133-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eaiere:v:16:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s40844-019-00133-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... theory/journal/40844

DOI: 10.1007/s40844-019-00133-5

Access Statistics for this article

Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review is currently edited by Kiichiro Yagi, Yuji Aruka and Takahiro Fujimoto

More articles in Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().