Last decades have seen a new environment on international organizations with the explicit increase of transnational corporations’ (TNCs) engagement in debates about global matters, mainly on their responsibilities regarding these issues. The dissertation analyzes how several processes in terms of achieving TNCs responsibility in global matters end up being a process of legitimation of the capitalist world order. Taking the world as it is and trying to reform it with a focus on the responsibility of the powerful agents might mean empowering them as if they were the most efficient actors to guarantee better solutions to the world. The analysis is centered on two current emblematic initiatives on the United Nations (UN): the Global Compact and the work of the UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights. Normative and political agreements on corporate responsibility, including prospects for mandatory norms on human rights, should be perceived as part of a global governance architecture which connects the social and development agenda to global capitalism, empowers non-state actors, globalizes international organizations and reduces the space for rethinking the world beyond a permanent legitimation of an emergent transnational capitalist class.