Resources and Sustainability

This panel will examine how business actors engaged with regulatory frameworks governing the use and re-use of natural resources over the course of the twentieth century. Discussion will cover a wide range of different actors operating on different scales: from the marginal scavengers who extracted byproducts from animal carcasses and slaughterhouse waste in German knackers’ yards, to agribusiness multinationals who transformed the Brazilian Amazon, to the multilateral committees that coordinated policy responses between firms in the International Chamber of Commerce. The panelists will consider how different environmental considerations such as hygiene, biodiversity, sustainability, and global warming intersected with individual and collective business priorities in the regulation of value chains. Taken together, the presentations will sketch how the conceptual and operational relationship between business and the environment has evolved from 1900 through the present, contextualising today’s debates over corporate responsibility and climate change.