This working paper is part of ongoing research on international comparison between European and Brazilian public policies for cross-sector and multi-actor social responsibility based on a concept of stakeholders’ social responsibility as proposed by Ashley (2010). One of the propositions presented here is that the process and content of public policy-making and business strategies for CSR can be seen in a co-evolution process, which is co-shaped by social, economic, environmental, political and institutional aspects through interactions between markets, civil society and the State, either at local, regional and national level, as well as at the global level. This proposition can serve as lenses for comprehension on the variety of perspectives for public policies on CSR in an international context. The paper presents, in a first section, an analysis and discussion on a literature review concerning European public polices for corporate social responsibility. In a second section, it presents a discussion on some recent contributions for research on social responsibility at the organizational and inter-institutional levels. One contribution is the ISO 26000 revised final draft, which migrates from the concept of corporate social responsibility to organizational social responsibility. Another one is a model for an inter-institutional framework for multi-level and multi-actor governance of stakeholders’ social responsibility (Ashley, 2010), to be further developed as part of a research agenda from a perspective of critical social studies. It is here assumed that the choice of theories, methods and goals for a research agenda is also a political decision, affecting the role definition of higher education institutions as relevant contributors for policy making on development cooperation. Thus, one key aspect for future research is on the choice of scope of content – from narrow to broad concepts – and on the time-frame – short, medium or long term time-frames - adopted by researchers for the concept of social responsibility. Another key political aspect for a research agenda on social responsibility is considered on the embedded quality of political interaction between the State, markets and civil-society concerning the mutual contribution for an inter-institutional learning framework in the research agenda and design.
