Ralph Hamann

Can business make decisive contributions to development? Towards a research agenda on corporate citizenship and beyond

This introductory article considers the increasingly prominent expectation that business can and will make a significant contribution to sustainable development under the banner of corporate citizenship or related terms. It suggests a research agenda that questions the underlying assumptions of this discourse and addresses some of the practicalities of enhancing the business contribution to development, with a focus on southern Africa. The suggested key research themes acknowledge the complexity and contradictions in current debates and expand the corporate citizenship agenda to embrace the possibility of more fundamental and systemic changes. These themes are (1) relating corporate citizenship to the southern African context; (2) the scope for innovative business opportunities and a new purpose for business; (3) the drivers and enabling conditions for corporate citizenship; (4) implementing corporate citizenship; and (5) measuring and monitoring the impacts of corporate citizenship efforts. The article cautions against too much optimism or excessive reliance on business contributions to development and it emphasises the need and opportunity for investigating the many open questions introduced here and in the articles in this special issue.

South Africa's Charter Approach to Post-Apartheid Economic Transformation: Collaborative Governance or Hardball Bargaining?*

This article considers the South African black economic empowerment (BEE) programme, with an emphasis on the sector charters in mining and finance, to investigate the extent to which these developments may be characterised in terms of collaborative governance. It argues that the genesis and content of the charters do represent important elements of collaborative governance, including a reliance on interest-based negotiation and an expectation that business contributes to the public benefit as good corporate citizens. But underlying these elements have been more powerful drivers related to power-based bargaining, whereby international investors have emerged as key, albeit ill-defined, stakeholders in South Africas post-apartheid transition. The role of corporate citizenship has been limited, despite efforts by business to portray the outcomes and agreements in terms of business voluntarism and enlightened self-interest. The article thus re-emphasises the role of the state in defining and enforcing a social role for big business. It raises concerns that the BEE programme charters prejudice more fundamental socio-economic transformation in the interests of the established corporations, and it calls for more research on how BEE is being implemented.

THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABILITY: A SOUTH AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACT Ever since the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, the concept of sustainable development has supposed to guide the future pattern of economies, societies and environmental well-being. Over the years, the notion of sustainability as a process of transition towards a more caring future for people and the planet, while enterprise flourishes, has gained topicality. This paper looks at how certain ideas, implicit in the transition to sustainability, can be converted into various economic, natural resources, social and environmental protection initiatives currently being developed in South Africa. The paper argues that many key policy measures could be converted to the sustainability paradigm with a programmed, but participatory change of original direction. However, there remains a serious lack of capacity within governance generally to meet legislative and popular expectations, particularly for South Africas poor people. For them, sustainability is a foreign word, even though many local actions and protests push in the general direction of sustainability. Genuine partnerships with South Africas energetic civil society are emerging and deserve much more specific encouragement, even though sustainability as such, will not be the only vehicle for this transformation. Sustainability remains too muddled, and too preferentially interpreted, for it ever to be a coherent driving force on its own.

Why Do SMEs Go Green? An Analysis of Wine Firms in South Africa

Studies on why small and medium enterprises (SMEs) engage in pro-environmental behavior suggest that managers’ environmental responsibility plays a relatively greater role than competitiveness and legitimacy-seeking. These categories of drivers are mostly considered independent of each other. Using survey data and comparative case studies of wine firms in South Africa, this study finds that managers’ environmental responsibility is indeed the key driver in a context where state regulation hardly plays any role in regulating dispersed, rural firms. However, especially proactive firms are also characterized by expectations of competitiveness gains. The authors thus emphasize the role of institutional context and potential interaction effects between these drivers in explaining the reasons why SMEs engage in pro-environmental behavior in developing countries.

The Business of Social and Environmental Innovation

Innovative responses are necessary to address persistent and intertwined problems such as poverty, resource degradation, or food insecurity. There is a growing expectation for business to play a proactive role in this, but there are still remarkable gaps in our understanding of how exactly business can generate social and environmental innovation. This book focuses on the business of social and environmental innovation in the African context, where these issues are particularly relevant but even less well understood. The following chapter sets the scene by introducing the key concepts and issues at stake. We argue that the emergence of social and environmental innovation is often associated with individual efforts of social entrepreneurs, organizational transformation in incumbent businesses, and/or cross-sector partnerships as collective efforts. This is reflected in the sequence of the chapters in this volume. We identify four cross-cutting themes which are addressed in some way or other by each of the contributing chapters: (1) social innovation as a process or outcome; (2) mapping and scaling up innovations; (3) tension between social purpose and profit generation; and (4) socio-economic and institutional context.

The role of business and cross-sector collaboration in addressing the ‘wicked problem’ of food insecurity

There is growing interest in the potential for business to make proactive contributions to food security, particularly as part of some form of cross-sector collaboration. Such collaboration can improve value chain efficiency and may also begin to address some of the ‘wicked problem’ characteristics of food insecurity. Our interviews conducted during the food price crisis in 2008 confirm that a broad cross-section of stakeholders agree that the crisis has cyclical and systemic causes and that it has serious implications for business. We also describe a range of related initiatives already being implemented by companies. There is a degree of ambivalence about the feasibility of improved collaboration, given competitive pressures and concerns about compliance with competition laws. Nevertheless, a number of respondents emphasised the need for improved collaboration on particular issues and the paper identifies a number of these, some of which have since been targeted in a multi-stakeholder initiative, the Southern Africa Food Lab, that builds on this (and other) research.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA

ABSTRACT The rapid evolution of environmental planning and sustainability in South Africa is catching up with resource management in the renewable sectors, namely water, soil, forests and fisheries. These are all critical areas for attention in the transition to sustainability, as they capture the application of the precautionary principle, community empowerment and more clearly defined property rights in the natural world. This article looks primarily at the potentially path breaking legislation of the National Water Act, but it also describes the implementative procedures for the forests and fisheries. The objectives of all these statutes are well meant: the actual operation on a day to day basis may well prove much more problematic. A lot will depend on how much this legislation is presented in sensitively appropriate ways to all relevant stakeholders.

Towards collective business action and cross-sector collaboration in responsible competitiveness clusters in southern Africa

Responsible competitiveness clusters are cross-sector collaboration initiatives focused on identifying and acting upon synergies between sustainable development and economic competitiveness objectives. By means of three case studies in southern Africa this paper investigates the incentives, opportunities and challenges encountered in the emergence of such clusters. The first case study focuses on a regional response to the development challenges encountered in a South African mining area, the second describes efforts to make the Malawian agriculture sector more inclusive and competitive and the third discusses options for enhancing the competitiveness of the Lesotho textile sector. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of international trade networks, the institutional framework, public sector support and internal governance processes as key factors influencing the initial level of success of these initiatives. 1Senior Researcher, Environmental Evaluation Unit, University of Cape Town; Programme Manager Malawi, African Institute of Corporate Citizenship; Director, African Institute of Corporate Citizenship; and Programme Manager, African Institute of Corporate Citizenship.

SOUTH AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ON THE MOVE

ABSTRACT The South African Constitution was framed in the context of attempting to promote citizen empowerment and the transition to sustainability. This article looks carefully at the provisions in the Constitution as they might apply to the transition to sustainability, notably the changing patterns of rights for citizens. The paper also examines the formation and innovative qualities of the 1998 National Environmental Management Act. This Act provides for a comprehensive commitment to environmental integration at all levels of government, and makes a tentative stab at the emergence of sustainability reporting. Fine legal words butter no implementation parsnips. The test will be in the conduct of these principles and procedures over the coming decade. This should provide a lively research arena for geographers, especially those interested in the relationship between implementive politics and transformational politics in the South African version of the sustainability transition.

Fostering Innovation for Sustainable Food Security: The Southern Africa Food Lab

This chapter describes the Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL) as a proactive social innovation, and explores the challenges and opportunities encountered in setting up such an initiative. Food insecurity and hunger persist in urban and rural areas in South Africa, with high levels of reported hunger and persistent chronic and micronutrient malnutrition. The SAFL works to facilitate shifts towards an equitable and sustainable food system, by stimulating ongoing dialogue and collaborative learning among stakeholders, and enhancing the effectiveness, accountability and legitimacy of multi-stakeholder teams working on innovations in the food system. Key tenets of the Lab process include an emphasis on emergence rather than predetermined outcomes, creating spaces for personal reflection and authentic communication, and shared experiences of the system ‘on the ground’. Challenges include engaging the leadership of activist NGOs and community groups and to have sustained participation from senior public and private sector actors. Issues of unequal power, constrained resources and different perspectives on the balance between talking, listening and acting are likely to continue to surface and provide opportunity for reflection and innovative action as the process unfolds.