Improving local implementation of an MNC's global CSR strategy: The importance of stakeholders

The private sector and multinational corporations (MNCs) in particular play an important role in encouraging and ensuring global sustainable development. For an MNC, this requires a local implementation of their global approach but realising this can be challenging. This challenge motivated the current paper. We argue that stakeholder's interests and needs at various scale levels should be met. This paper demonstrates how an MNC can identify useful corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities for various stakeholders by taking into account salience, credibility and legitimacy. The paper develops a CSR self-assessment tool that allows an MNC at both local and global level to determine the usefulness of local CSR activities for stakeholders and that identifies if value is created with local activities. Based on case study research, the self-assessment tool designed for this research has proven to be useful. This paper concludes with concrete propositions on what MNCs can do to improve local implementation of their global CSR strategy.