Between Soft Law and Soft Focus: Transposition of national Action plans and Public Policies on Corporate Social Responsibility throughout the EU

Since 2002, The European Commission put Corporate Social Responsibility on its agenda. The issue was not included within an EU Directive, but was approached as a soft law issue. This study tries to look for indicators in the theoretical debate concerning Europeanization for associations between Member States’ usual ‘culture of implementation’ and the transposition of CSR policies as suggested by the Commission. In doing so, the world of compliance theory was used as a framework of analysis to hold the progress of the Member States in the field of CSR against. The analysis showed that countries partly behave as expected when looking at the world of compliance theory, but the actual transposition of CSR policies cannot be explained with this theory. It was also found that the Commission did not make full use of its monitoring and enforcement means available under soft law.