Environmental CSR From the Standpoint of Stakeholder Theory: Rethinking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the practice of voluntary environmental protection by business in excess of fulfilling mandatory requirements (norms, standards, environmental taxes and fees, etc.) of the state, manifested in the form of environmental initiatives (for example, the creation of an environmentally friendly urban environment), in the form of the introduction of “green” innovations (for example, waste reduction) and in the form of responsible investments (for example, co-financing of clean energy development programs) (Popkova et al., 2021; Popkova and Zavyalova, 2021; Huo et al., 2022; Lin et al., 2022; Zhang and Cheng, 2022). In the existing literature, Madaleno et al. (2022), Schiessl et al. (2022), Yang et al. (2022), Yu et al. (2022) indicate the non-commercial nature of environmental CSR. The development of this responsibility is associated with the progress of society. The prevalence of environmental CSR practices is explained, on the one hand, by the ability of society (consumers) to assess the importance of these practices and the tendency to give preference to responsible business products and, on the other hand, by the internal motivation of business leaders to protect the environment. Since society is continuously progressing, the process of development of environmental CSR is considered linear and is described as an upward trend. The works of Awawdeh et al. (2022), Cheng and Zhang (2022), Godefroit-Winkel et al. (2022), Sadiq et al. (2022) note the contradictory interests of business and society in the implementation of environmental CSR. Consumers expect companies to be willing to donate part of their profits to environmental CSR as a charity and therefore do not always give preference to “green” products with similar consumer properties compared with less environmentally friendly analogues. For businesses, in turn, environmental CSR is associated with additional costs, while sources of financing are often limited, and high market competition dictates the need to recover their investments. The noted conflict of interests constrains the development of environmental CSR and limits its scale. In the works of Inshakova and Solntsev (2022), Liu and Gao (2022), Madaleno et al. (2022), breakthrough technologies are considered as a deterrent to environmental CSR. Since this responsibility increases the cost of products anyway, technological modernization further increases this cost and limits the possibility of selling products on the target market (Astafyeva et al., 2020; Osipov et al., 2022). In this regard, the scientific and practical problem of the development of environmental CSR in the era of artificial intelligence (the AI era) comes to the fore. The combination of intensive social progress (the development of society and the knowledge economy) with technological progress can Edited by: Bruno Sergi, Harvard University, United States