Call for Abstracts

A little over one decade ago, then UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon (2011), in his attempt to highlight the incompatibility of economic growth objectives and planetary boundaries, labelled the 20^th Century economic model as a “global suicide pact”. Even though there was no lack of urgency in 2011, with hindsight, this was still in the good old days of relative peace and stability. Since then, we have moved from the (admittedly painstakingly slow) process of building up global governance infrastructures and the incremental greening of industries towards a series of large-scale disruptions that include the rise of populism and economic nationalism, Brexit, artificial intelligence, post-truth, Covid-19, regional violent conflict, or the United States’ withdrawal from multi-lateral institutions such as the IPCC, UNFCCC and the WHO. Strange times indeed. The fear is that these shorter-term developments rapidly undermine the governance infrastructure needed to tackle the set of longer-term grand challenges as embodied by the UN SDGs. Are these developments only temporary blips or more permanent fissures of the governance system for sustainability? What do they mean for the transition to sustainability? And what do they mean for voluntary, stakeholder-driven, beyond-compliance corporate responsibility? Is there anything out there that can provide us with optimism?

In addition, these global-level trends coincide with our decision to take CRRC as a traditionally European corporate responsibility conference to Marrakech, Morocco. Marrakech is one of the gateways to Africa, a vast continent with its own unique set of sustainability challenges that often tend to be marginalized, if not forgotten, by Western corporate responsibility theorizing. As such, the conference opens up an array of research opportunities, allowing us to reflect on and refine Western-centric views of CSR, corporate sustainability, sustainability transitions and related concepts and practices.

CRRC is a cross-disciplinary conference looking for both conceptual and empirical papers filling the research and knowledge gap in both theory and practice related to the impact of CSR on society. We are interested in contributions from different disciplines and fields of study. CRRC is the ideal place to test new ideas and to experiment with new formats. Therefore, we welcome suggestions for special workshop streams and innovative ideas. The tradition of CRRC is to focus on participants and the debate. We aim to create an environment that is welcoming and friendly yet succeeds in challenging the existing knowledge base and assumptions, and hence drives the debate around corporate responsibility forward.

Initial abstracts of approx. 500 words should be emailed to crrconference2026@gmail.com by 29 May 2026. Files should be sent in MS Word format, and the file name should be first author’s surname. Please include names, affiliations and contact details of all authors. We are flexible with regard to the formatting of the abstract, but would like to ask authors to make sure that they cover the following aspects:

• Research Question: What is the research question that the submission aims to answer?
• Theoretical Framework: What are the main concepts, models or theories used in the paper? Include 3-4 central references.
• Method: Which method is used for the research work?
• Findings: What are the main outcomes and results of the paper?
• Which sub-theme is your paper aimed at or is it for the open call?

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