This project builds upon an extremely successful conference organized by Professor Harald Baum from the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law on 17-18 July 2014 in Berlin.

At the Berlin conference it became clear that the rise of the independent director in Asia is an issue of global consequence that has been largely overlooked. Less than two decades ago, independent directors were oddities in Asia’s boardrooms. Today, they are ubiquitous. This project undertakes the first detailed analysis of this phenomenon. It seeks to provide in-depth historical, contextual and comparative perspectives on the law and practice of independent directors in seven core Asian jurisdictions (China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) and Australia.

Our preliminary findings suggest that there are “varieties of independent directors in Asia”, none of which conform to the American concept of the independent director. This project aims to develop a taxonomy of these varieties to provide a powerful analytical tool for more accurately understanding independent directors in Asia. This new approach challenges foundational aspects of comparative corporate governance practice and suggests a new path for comparative corporate governance scholarship and reform.

The research output of this project will be published as an edited volume by Cambridge University Press, entitled: “Independent Directors in Asia: A Historical, Contextual, and Comparative Approach”, Dan W. Puchniak, Harald Baum and Luke Nottage (Eds.) (Forthcoming). For an overview of the key comparative and theoretical findings of this project see: Dan W. Puchniak and Kon Sik Kim, “Varieties of Independent Directors in Asia: A Taxonomy”, available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2930785.