Comparative evaluation of the Austrian draft CSR action plan

With its New EU Strategy for Corporate Social Responsibility of Companies (CSR), the European Commission called on all Member States to develop their own plans for the promotion of CSR. In this context, the Austrian Federal Government developed a National Action Plan meant to provide a framework for a systematic and successful implementation of CSR. These developments were coordinated by the Ministry of Economics, the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Life. Intermediate findings are now available. adelphi was asked to classify these intermediate findings in the context of the respective efforts at the EU level and in other EU Member States and to evaluate them on a comparative basis.

The classification was carried out in the context of key documents such as the 2011 CSR Communication of the European Commission and the approaches adopted by other EU Member States (e.g. the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark). Four aspects of CSR action plans were compared: thematic priorities, instruments, stakeholders and, finally, monitoring and evaluation.

The results show that the draft version of the Austrian Action Plan can compete qualitatively with the approaches taken by European peers and that it set priorities that may be able to stand up as examples of best practice.