Enrolling the Private Sector in Community Development: Magic Bullet or Sleight of Hand?

Abstract

The role of the private sector in international development is growing, supported by new and evolving official programmes, financing, partnerships and narratives. This article examines the place of the private sector in 'community development' in the global South. It situates corporate community development (CCD) conceptually in long-standing debates within critical development studies to consider the distinct roles that corporations are playing and how they are responding to the challenges and contradictions entailed within 'community development'. Drawing on field-based research across three different contexts and sectors for CCD in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and South Africa, the article suggests that caution is required in assuming that corporations can succeed where governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international development organizations have so often met with complex challenges and intractable difficulties. We argue that four specific problems confront CCD: (a) the problematic ways in which 'communities' are defined, delineated and constructed; (b) the disconnected nature of many CCD initiatives, and lack of alignment and integration with local and national development planning policies and processes; (c) top-down governance, and the absence or erosion of participatory processes and empowerment objectives; (d) the tendency towards highly conservative development visions.

Reversing the lens: Why corporate social responsibility is not community development

“…Clearly, the relationship between corporation and community in the development context as illustrated here is complex, and although CSR/CCD initiatives form part of this relationship, they are not the only elements. Other effects of the corporate presence (immanent elements such as the local business development and employment, for example) intersect with local agendas, structures, power relations and agency, shaping the development outcomes and relationships that evolve (McEwan et al, ).…”

“…The process of identifying and constructing the community has become increasingly explicit in nature, being designated a key task of CSR (Kapelus, , p. 2), albeit one that critics argue commodifies communities and provides “moral legitimation to corporate authority, while delimiting responsibility” (Rajak, , p. 47). These processes have the effect of setting limits around the corporation's social, geographic, and developmental responsibilities towards different groups, depending on where they sit in relation to the definition of “community” that is developed (see McEwan, Mawdsley, Banks, & Scheyvens, ).…”

“…Related to this, the boundaries of “the community” for which responsibility is to be assumed are rarely stable or clearly defined (McEwan et al, ). In some cases, boundaries will shift in response to the so‐called “squeaky wheel” syndrome: When a geographic or social community makes themselves visible to the corporate gaze through protests or direct action that threatens the corporate interests, one response is to broaden the scope of the communities to which “responsibility” is to be assumed.…”

How different are corporate social responsibility motives in a developing country? Insights from a study of Indian agribusiness firms

“…From the very inception of community studies, rural or agricultural settlements have stood as a proxy for community (Bhattacharyya, ). At the same time, critical development scholars point out that in real life situations in developing countries business practitioners often struggle to define and delimit “communities” (McEwan, Mawdsley, Banks, & Scheyvens, ). Our interviews revealed the validity of this observation: the managers used the language that acknowledged the spatial dimension of the term “community”; however, for them this dimension was determined not so much by the geographical borders of a particular village, but by the functional relationship that a territory and the people living in it had to their firm.…”

SDGs, Foreign Ministries and the Art of Partnering with the Private Sector

“…The difference, however, is that the SDG agenda makes this a joint responsibility of public and private stakeholders. The 'public' role of the private sector is already recognized in concepts such as shared value (Porter and Kramer, 2011), corporate social responsibility and responsible business conduct (OECD, 2016), as well as in business diplomacy narratives emphasizing the international agency of companies (Kesteleyn et al, 2014;McEwan et al, 2017;. Firms have the potential to bring a variety of resources and strengths to sustainable development, while becoming active participants in multi-stakeholder diplomacy.…”