Regional policies for responsible development: interregional report

Abstract

Responsible Med is one of the Med programme’s projects. It aims at better understanding CSR among Mediterranean SMEs, especially as far as the consequences of CSR projects on competitiveness are concerned, and with the final goal to better support such SMEs in the development and implementation of such CSR projects. In this document, you will find the final output of the Work package 3 (WP3). Nine partners from six countries of the European Mediterranean region conducted in-depth « State of the art » and « State of Practice » reviews in their different regions, which resulted in eight regional documents1 and an interregional report. In this interregional report, three main topics are covered: • The Methodology of the study2: this part aims at better explaining the conditions in which the data has been collected, in order to construct bias hypotheses; • The Academic comparative study: based on the eight regional documents, a comparative academic study has been carried out, its results can be read in chapter 4; • The Results of the quantitative studies: based on questionnaires, which had been administered to 171 companies and 32 organisations, the project leader of WP3 (the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Marseille Provence) proposed to extract the main facts and analyses of the quantitative comparisons3. Based on those results, conclusions and recommendations have been conducted in a very practical manner – as the next step of the Responsible Med project is to imagine, build and develop tools to support SMEs in their implementation of CSR projects – and to measure their efficiency on competitiveness.