Water Management Reporting in the Agro-Food Sector in South Africa

Abstract

Abstract:The purpose of the study is to assess whether Corporate Social Responsibility regarding water is considered relevant for sustainability in companies related to agriculture in South Africa, considering that their impact directly influences public access to water. To accomplish this purpose, a qualitative approach was developed through the study of the 22 existing companies from the agriculture sector, food and beverages, forest and paper production, and Tobacco, which published their last integrated report within the Global Reporting Initiative framework. A thematic content analysis was carried out, involving the analysis of the written sustainability reports. For data analyses, ATLAS.ti 7.1 software was used to match the main aspects related to water management. Pragmatic advice for practitioners derives from the research results, considering that Corporate Social Responsibility in general-and sustainable water management in particular-represents an opportunity for companies to get competitive advantages in the market. The study also determines the best practices in the field in South Africa with benchmarking purposes.

Orientation towards social responsibility of North-West African firms

“…In fact, businesses everywhere are increasingly adopting socially and environmentally responsible practices though new sustainable businesses models, while maintaining and improving their levels of profitability (Upward and Jones, 2016). Despite the scarce number of publications devoted to Africa which address CSR and firm performance, some relevant contributions exist in specific countries or specific contexts (Eweje, 2006(Eweje, , 2007, dedicated to discovering emerging trends in corporate social investment (Skinner and Mersham, 2008;Arya and Bassi, 2011;Mersham and Skinner, 2016) and studying the use of codes of good practices (Arya and Bassi, 2011) or related to corporate social reporting activities (De Villiers and Van Staden, 2006;Dawkins and Ngunjiri, 2008;Mitchell and Hill, 2009;Kolk and Lenfant, 2010;Sánchez-Hernández et al, 2017b). Previous literature also has focussed on countries such as South Africa (Hinson and Ndhlovu, 2011), Kenya Maru, 2012, 2014;Muthuri, 2013), Nigeria (Amaeshi et al, 2006;Amao, 2008), Tanzania (Egels, 2005) and Ghana (Julian and Ofori-Dankwa, 2013).…”

Stakeholders’ Participation in Sustainable Tourism Planning for a Rural Region: Extremadura Case Study (Spain)

“…Subsequently, the transcribed texts of the audio recordings of the focus groups are analyzed by assigning codes that, in turn, may generate new codes, which are to be merged, and if necessary, accepted and integrated into the coding agenda, being considered as another result of the research and an adaptation of previous theory to real case studies. According to Sánchez-Hernández, Robina-Ramírez, and De Clercq [25], text coding could be interpreted as a "summative check" of reliability. Therefore, after the first round of work on the transcripts, we focused on the main categories and subcategories.…”

“…In order to investigate the concrete formulation of evaluations and proposals for solutions that stakeholders propose for the tourism sector in the region, we have started from the formulation of questions to be discussed in propositional methodological terms, based on the literature presented briefly in the previous sections [25]. Table 1 shows the deductive model applied for data analysis.…”

“…The result of these propositions-questions is a large number of individual codes that we have grouped into analysis categories for processing in the ATLAS.ti tool, which evidently maintain associations among themselves. Figure 4 shows the final coding "agenda" developed for this study, which seeks, following Sánchez-Hernández, Robina-Ramírez, and De Clercq [25], to ensure both formative and summative verification of reliability (Figure 1). The interpretation of the results is presented in the form of concept maps (Figure 4).…”

“…Table 1, based on a deductive approach, shows the stages of this process. Sánchez-Hernández, Robina-Ramírez, and De Clercq [25] explain that the application of deductive categories works on the basis of a prior theoretical definition of the main aspects of the analysis, which connects them with the texts.…”