08-11-2012, 10:59 AM
The real face of corporate social responsibility
1The real face of corporate.pdf (Size: 1.1 MB / Downloads: 44)
All day a steady file of people make their way up and
down the potholed main road running through
Umuechem, going to and from a polluted stream
that is now their only source of water. Large trucks
thunder by at regular intervals, on their way to and
from the oil pumping station on the outskirts of
town. For, despite the lack of basic amenities, this is
the oil-rich Niger Delta of southern Nigeria.
As well as taps that are dry, this town of 10,000
people also has a hospital that has never treated a
patient, a secondary school where no lessons have
ever been taught, a post office that has never
handled a letter and a women’s centre that has never
held a meeting. All were supposed to have been
supplied under ‘community development’ schemes,
funded from oil money – local wells produce 15,000
barrels a day. But all have failed or remain unfinished.
Four of these projects were ‘generous’ gifts from the
Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria –
the oil giant’s subsidiary that runs the flow station
near Umuechem and is the country’s dominant oil
company. The others, including the water system,
came from the state-financed Nigeria Delta
Development Corporation, which works alongside
Shell – to similar effect.
Where does CSR come from?
While the subject of business ethics has a long
history, CSR has become a distinctive topic more
recently. During the 1980s, the United Nations
grappled with the international Code of Conduct on
Transnational (multinational) Corporations, covering
areas such as labour standards, consumers’ rights,
women’s rights, the environment, corruption and
restrictive business practices.6 The code was never
approved, largely because of US government and
corporate opposition to its scope and legal status.
Modern CSR was born during the 1992 Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro, as an explicit
endorsement of voluntary approaches rather than
mandatory regulation. The UN Centre on
Transnational Corporations was charged with
researching the regulation of business and coming
up with regulatory proposals. It produced a set of
recommendations on corporate regulation for the
Earth Summit’s action plan. But these were rejected
after western states and businesses lobbied in
favour of a manifesto for voluntarism drafted by
the World Business Council for Sustainable
Development, a coalition of companies ‘united by a
shared commitment to sustainable development’.
What drives CSR?
There are sound economic reasons for companies to
promote CSR, which create an incentive to report
CSR ‘successes’ that often overtake genuine change
and tangible improvement. Examining some of the
factors driving companies to make socially and
environmentally responsible promises helps explain
the growth in CSR over the last few years, but also
illustrates the limitations of the voluntary approach.