Holding corporations accountable
"The rising power of global corporations is a serious challenge to Australian democracy"
In the present, global corporations are presenting a rising challenge to nationally grounded democracies. And they are increasingly expressing a will to govern once more. This project sinks its teeth into understanding the puzzles this return throws up and how we might address them.
Why this matters
Companies go back even longer than states. And since their inception, they have been rivals in political, economical and legal terms.
The rising power of global corporations is a serious challenge to Australian democracy. Corporations have gone global, but the mechanisms to ensure they serve the public interest, pay tax and comply with national laws have not. So far, international law has not been able to help.
Corporations are a fascinating phenonmen dating back to pre-colonial times. From the early church to the East India Company, they have governed people and places.
Our impact
With the support of the Australian Research Council, we have established the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law. The LPGCIL is a collaborative and multidisciplinary of research directed toward understanding, interrogating and reconceptulising the relationship between global corporations, states and international law.
Our research takes an historical and theoretically informed approach to present concerns, which locates the relationship between companies, state and plural laws in an historical context stretching from the early modern period to the present day.
The program of research is unique in its historical depth, theoretical ambition, and geographic, economic and temporal span. Grounded in an excellent team at Melbourne Law School, and joined by exceptional research collaborators on all continents, it will change the way we understand companies, states and international law and the relationship between them.
Together, our research team is developing a new historical and theoretical account of the relationship between states and corporations to gain a better understanding of the present, and to help identify reforms to international law and institutions to remedy the current imbalance.
This project, and the new generation of researchers it is training at the LLM, PhD and Postdoctoral level will enhance Australia's capacity to hold global corporations to democratic standards, legal accountability and taxation, and establish Australia as a world leader in maintaining the balance going forward.
