Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Governance in Chile

Abstract

This paper examines how CSR in the mining sector in Chile changed since its implementation and what factors triggered those changes. This article argues that CSR strategy in the mining sector is the result of how companies responded to a particular configuration of external pressure composed mainly of three factors: at the national level, was the tightening of environmental regulation; the other factors, at the subnational level, were the multiplication of social conflicts and reputational crisis. To understand the variation of CSR strategy in the mining sector, this article offers a novel framework based on the complementarity of three institutional theories: the business system approach, the new institutionalism, and historical institutionalism. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of CODELCO, the Chilean state-owned copper company that is one of the world´s leading copper producers. The paper provides a “bottom-up” perspective on the transformation of CODELCO´s CSR practices over the period 1998-2019. The analysis shows that the combination of factors, tightening of environmental regulation, the multiplication of social conflicts and reputational crisis, led to changes in CSR strategy by increasing CODELCO´S internal complexity.