The Theory and Practice of Learning Networks

Under the leadership of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the United Nations has played an active role in promoting corporate social responsibility as one means to respond to the challenges of globalisation. The Global Compact has been Annan's major initiative in this domain. It has explicitly adopted a learning approach to inducing corporate change, as opposed to a regulatory approach; and it comprises a network form of organisation, as opposed to the traditional hierarchic/bureaucratic form. These distinctive (and, for the UN, unusual) features lead the Compact’s critics to seriously underestimate its potential, while its supporters may hold excessive expectations of what it can deliver. Because organisational issues of this sort will continue to confront the search for viable global governance mechanisms for many years ahead, this paper spells out both the advantages but also the inherent limitations of the ‘learning networks’ approach.