FORUM 2008

Patrick Bond ()

Development and Change, 2008, vol. 39, issue 6, 1037-1052

Abstract: type="main" xml:lang="en">

If Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is often reduced to ‘greenwashing’ for naïve middle-class consumers, is there a more durable force to address excessive profit taking and consequent underdevelopment? While the post-apartheid era in South Africa has been celebrated, with little foresight, for an ‘economic boom’ that restored relative corporate profitability to levels last witnessed during apartheid's heyday, the same period saw world-class social opposition to corporate power. Three areas are illustrative: the Treatment Action Campaign's street pressure and legal strategy to acquire anti-retroviral drugs for HIV-positive people; Sowetans whose street protests helped drive Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux out of Johannesburg and whose constitutional case over the right to water attacked its commercialization policies; and climate activists who oppose carbon trading. Meanwhile, activists also demanded reparations from apartheid-tainted transnational corporations in the US courts through the Alien Tort Claims Act, while a ‘Corpse Awards' was launched by activists in part to mitigate against CSR efforts. The critiques of corporations — and CSR — and the motivation for social activism are informed by strategic principles of ‘decommodification’ and ‘deglobalization of capital’; the first cannot work without the second.

Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2008.00528.x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:devchg:v:39:y:2008:i:6:p:1037-1052

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0012-155X

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Development and Change from International Institute of Social Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().