PUBLIC INTEREST AND PRIVATE POLICY: THE CASE OF IMPLEMENTING CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN DUTCH INDUSTRY Prof.dr

An increasing number of firms with a foothold in the Netherlands try to implement ‘corporate social responsibility’. This article considers these efforts in the light of the changing relation between the state and society. It analyses the processes of learning that were induced by the programme ‘From financial to sustainable profit’ of the Dutch National Initiative for Sustainable Development (NIDO), a publicly financed foundation that operates at arm’s length of government. To assess the design of the NIDO initiative from the perspective of its ability to enable practices of governance in discursive interactions with the private sector, a theoretical perspective is outlined that integrates concepts of learning with an understanding of societal change that is based on the "duality of structure" concept (Giddens, 1984). The article argues that the ability to induce processes of learning and structural change renders NIDO’s approach a viable contribution to actively staging processes of governance as a society-centred practice.