ABSTRACT
The legal and regulatory compliance spectrum is widely complemented by ‘soft law’ type documents. Codified and standardized procedures, guidelines such as environmental management systems, agreed objectives and values such as formulated in the Global Compact and other initiatives including the finance sector range from voluntary behaviour to peer pressure and the acceptance of common business behaviour by courts, e.g. in commercial disputes. Assessments and monitoring of environmental social and governance (ESG)-initiatives provide evidence that taking them into serious consideration can result in various benefits. Systematization always depends on context and purpose. A key feature of the systematization scheme is the choice of the dimensions according to which initiatives can be characterized. The Carroll-pyramid assigning a scale on the compliance spectrum provides a good starting point for one dimension. The choice for the initiatives used here is motivated by the following factors: good documentation, widely differing profiles ensuring broad coverage of the criteria.
