Sustainable development (SD) -that is, ''Development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs and aspirations'' -can be pursued in many dierent ways. Stakeholder relations management (SRM) is one such way, through which corporations are confronted with economic, social, and environmental stakeholder claims. This paper lays the groundwork for an empirical analysis of the question of how far SD can be achieved through SRM. It describes the so-called SD-SRM perspective as a distinctive research approach and shows how it relates to the wider body of stakeholder theory. Next, the concept of SD is operationalized for the microeconomic level with reference to important documents. Based on the ensuing SD framework, it is shown how SD and SRM relate to each other, and how the two concepts relate to other popular concepts such as Corporate Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. The paper concludes that the significance of societal guiding models such as SD and of management approaches like CSR is strongly dependent on their footing in society.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), Public policies on CSR, Business self-regulation, Business–government relations, New governance, Business–society relations, Societal co-regulation, Sustainable development,

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Governments, in particular in Western Europe, have become increasingly active in promoting and shaping corporate social responsibility (CSR). The present paper conceptually and empirically characterises the public policies on CSR in Europe. In a first (conceptual) step, public policies on CSR are portrayed by distinguishing five types of policy instruments (i.e. legal, economic, informational, partnering, and hybrid tools) that can be employed in four fields of action (i.e. awareness for CSR, transparency, socially responsible investment, and leading by example). In a second (empirical) step, this typology is employed to show how EU member states actually promote CSR policies. The empirical stocktaking provides an overview of more than 200 policy instruments in three of the four fields of action. In a third step, the paper compares the status of public policies on CSR in Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). By means of a simple instrument count and an analysis of variance (ANOVA) it is shown that Western European (particularly Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian) governments are significantly more active in promoting CSR than governments in CEE countries. Since these differences mirror the differences regarding the popularity of CSR as a management approach in Europe, the paper concludes that public policies on CSR reinforce rather than offset the European 'CSR gap'. Copyright

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