Corporate accountability in South Africa: the role of community mobilizing in environmental governance

Contrasting perspectives of international companies and civil society groups have divided recent debates about corporate responsibility in developing countries. The Corporate Social Responsibility discourse has been promoted by business lobbies, emphasizing the role of international companies in voluntarily contributing towards the solution of pressing social and environmental problems through partnerships with other stakeholders. The notion of corporate accountability has become the rallying point for sustainable development, demanding stricter regulation of corporate behaviour by national governments and the enactment of an international corporate accountability convention. This article assesses the promises and pitfalls of these two competing approaches to industries in South Africa. The article argues that a multi-level approach is necessary to the impact of CSR and corporate accountability initiatives. It concludes that CSR may improve environmental management systems and reduce corporate pollution levels whereas corporate accountability approaches may provide important incentives for companies to improve their environmental performance, assist in the development of national environmental governance frameworks guiding company-community interaction, and facilitate the enforcement of national legislation pertaining to corporate responsibility. However, both approaches fail to address the underlying, globallevel structural causes of conflicts between companies and stakeholders affected by their operations. These conflicts can only be reversed by fundamental changes in the global economy.     

Dimensions of State Environmental Policies

States have developed an array of environmental programs in response to a variety of political and environmental factors. This article examines three state clean air programs—setting ambient standards, ambient monitoring, and enforcement—and shows how each program has a distinct set of empirical determinants, reflecting the programs' diverse purposes. States' ambient standards policies allocate resources among competing claimants, and consequently they reflect the balance of environmental politics in each state. Ambient monitoring programs reflect the degree to which states need and can process information about air pollution problems. The level of states' enforcement programs reflects the scope of the environmental problem in each state.     

INCE NTIVE SYSTEMS IN ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION*

The central problem of environmental and other regulation is identified as a control problem similar to that faced by principals in controlling their agents. An incentive systems framework, featuring the concept of incentive relation, is offered as a means of integrating and systematizing discussion of alternative means of regulation. The distinction of incentive and directive means of environmental regulation, together with the levels of their targets and the penalties for enforcement, are employed to develop a typology of regulatory means and to categorize environmental regulatory alternatives. Shifting from control of regulatees to control of regulators, some results of a study of the incentive systems facing state reclamation inspectors are reported. Dual external incentive relations (to the mining industry and to the federal Office of Surface Mining) are observed, and the design consequences for regulation in the federal system are discussed.     

The Diffusion of Voluntary International Management Standards: Responsible Care,ISO 9000, and ISO 14001 in the Chemical Industry

This article analyzes the factors that explain the international diffusion of voluntary international management standards. We argue that international management standards should not be analyzed in isolation but in conjunction with other standards and their institutional environment. We present two opposite views explaining how the previous diffusion of management standards facilitates or hampers the adoption of new management standards. We test a comprehensive model of diffusion of international environmental management standards within the chemical industry using a panel of 113 different countries during the period 2000 to 2003. Our results show that the previous experience of businesses in voluntary standards such as the Chemical Industry's Responsible Care Program or ISO 9000, government commitment toward Environmental Management Systems Standards, and the level of activity of international nongovernmental organizations in the country of adoption, impact positively on the adoption of ISO 14001 by chemical firms. Unlike previous studies that focused mostly on cross industry analyses, we do not find trade‐related factors significant while explaining adoption in the chemical industry. Our results differ, therefore, from previous research and highlight the need to isolate industry effects to understand the diffusion of international standards.     

Voluntary Agencies as Development Organizations: Theorizing the Problem of Efficiency and Accountability

Co-operatives, NGOs and community groups are being increasingly used as development agencies by policy-makers, because they are thought to provide more accountable, effective and equitable services in many areas than public or private agencies. This article attempts to consider some of the theoretical and practical implications of this growing role by treating them as ‘value-driven’ organizations, and asking how this differentiates them, in terms of efficiency and accountability, from public or private agencies. It notes the lack of developed theoretical models capable of dealing with this question, and examines the relevance of existing theories (neo-classical economics, public administration and especially varieties of organization theory including the New Institutional Economics) in dealing with agencies which claim to be dominated by motivations based on democracy and altruism rather than self-interest. The author looks at problems associated with the measurement of efficiency and enforcement of accountability in organizational life and at the need for effective incentives and sanctions which provide a stable basis for maintaining commitment. He then considers the issues involved in the enforcement of accountability to ensure the efficient use of resources in producer co-operatives on the one hand and service delivery NGOs on the other. In the former, the focus is on the strengths and weaknesses of market competition and the costs of collective management; in the latter on the varied relationships between ‘principals and agents' involved in the production and management of services.     

Municipal Councillors and the Everyday State: New Representations of Political Accountability in Ahmedabad,India

Scholarly literature on municipal councillors in urban India has variously labelled them as ‘lords’, ‘captains’ and ‘shrewd operators’ who have the power to mobilize resources and act as political intermediaries between the state and ordinary citizens. Conversely, voters are seen as collectively trading their votes to secure access to the state's resources. In this article, empirical fieldwork in the city of Ahmedabad, India, suggests that while traditional modes of patron–client relationships continue to exist at the municipal urban governance level, there has been a shift in the roles as perceived by municipal councillors themselves. The ‘state at the roadside’ model of urban governance is being expanded to include new modes and sites of mediation with citizens. Drawing from the literature on political representative claims and social representation theory, this article argues that the changes in the practices of municipal councillors are driven partly by political aspirations that are distinct from their identity as a party karyakarta (worker) and partly as a response to a better-informed citizenry, referred to as jagrukt janta (public awareness). These shifts create the conditions for new modes of civic engagement and political accountability within existing patronage-based networks.     

Territorializing spatial data: Controlling land through One Map projects in Indonesia and Myanmar

Once confined to paper, national cartographic projects increasingly play out through spatial data infrastructures such as software programs and smartphones. Across the Global South, foreign donor-funded digital platforms emphasize transparency, accountability and data sharing while echoing colonial projects that consolidated state-based territorial knowledge. This article brings political geography scholarship on state and counter-mapping together with new work on the political ecology of data to highlight a contemporary dimension of territorialization, one in which state actors seek to consolidate and authorize national geospatial information onto digital platforms. We call attention to the role of data infrastructures in contemporary resource control, arguing that territorializing data both extends state territorialization onto digital platforms and, paradoxically, provides new avenues for non-state actors to claim land. Drawing on interviews, document review, and long-term fieldwork, we compare the origins, institutionalization and realization of Indonesia and Myanmar's ‘One Map’ projects. Both projects aimed to create a government-managed online spatial data platform, building on national mapping and management traditions while responding to new international incentives, such as climate change mitigation in Indonesia and good democratic governance in Myanmar. While both projects encountered technical difficulties and evolved during implementation, different national histories and political trajectories resulted in the embrace and expansion of the program in Indonesia but reluctant participation and eventual crisis in Myanmar. Together, these cases show how spatial data infrastructures can both extend state control over space and offer opportunities for contesting or reimagining land and nation, even as such infrastructures remain embedded in local power relations.     

Digital extraction: Blockchain traceability in mineral supply chains

Digital data — including technologically-mediated data generated by blockchain-enabled traceability — is performing an increasingly integral role in extractive operations, but scarce attention has been paid to the structuring effect of these digital technologies or the socio-economic spatiality of data-driven mining operations. Drawing on extensive qualitative research (interviews, participant observation, and two sets of survey data among actors relevant to these mineral supply chains), this article advances the notion of “digital extraction” to describe the collection, analysis, and instrumentalization of digital data generated under the banner of blockchain-based due diligence, chain of custody certifications, and various transparency mechanisms, situated alongside and in support of mineral extraction. The article mobilizes concepts from political geography and political ecology to argue that digital technologies of traceability in extractive processes potentially create new forms of control and exclusion or exacerbate existing social, political, and territorial dispossession through asymmetric relations of power and knowledge in mineral supply chains. Despite industry efforts to make mineral supply chains more sustainable by resorting to digital certification and traceability, the strategic uses of uncertainty, ignorance, and ambiguity undergirding blockchain-enabled traceability systems fail to challenge existing inequalities in resource use and access or fulfill the promise of transparency and accountability.     

Dual‐Use Technology In the Context of the Non‐Proliferation Regime

Many technologies have both vital legitimate uses and potent military applications. An international regulatory regime has been devised for the purpose of monitoring the use of the most dangerous of these technologies, namely chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Multiple examples of the use of chemical and biological weapons against members of the public, and evidence of prohibited state weapons development programs, demonstrate the vital need for a more effective enforcement regime. The authors discuss the concept and threat of dual‐use technology, the existing regulatory regime and its shortcomings, and propose enhancing this regime with powerful international judicial authorities to enable the prosecution of any state, group or individual who attempts to misuse dual‐use technology.     

Privatization in Bangladesh: The Emergence of ‘Family Capitalism’

The programme of state enterprise privatization pursued by the government of Bangladesh since 1975, largely under the influence and financial conditions of the aid agencies, has been subject to widespread debate. In 1991, at the suggestion of the World Bank, the government of Bangladesh formed the Privatization Board to ensure better outcomes of privatization. This article investigates whether firms privatized under the auspices of the Privatization Board up to 1996 were adding to the nation's economic growth or — as critics claimed — to individual families’ pockets. More specifically, it examines whether enterprises privatized in 1991–6 reversed previous losses and introduced better management controls, leading to increased investment, productivity, and overall organizational effectiveness and efficiency. The major findings are not supportive of privatization policy, indicating that the performance of privatized enterprises has not improved significantly. Without denying the economic problems of Bangladesh's public enterprises, past and present, this article questions the performance of privatized companies in terms of their declining profitability and productivity; employment conditions and trade union and individual rights; altered distributions of value added in absolute and relative terms; and serious lack of financial transparency and accountability.     

发展民营经济增加吉林省就业和收入研究

当我国改革开放的历史车轮向21世纪胜利推进的时候,失业和再就业这个跨世纪难题已凸现在我们面前。在当前的形势下,国有企业本身消化失业的能力已十分有限,靠国有企业解决失业的思路难以成为现实。比较可行的选择是大力发展民营经济,以此消除国有企业冗员劳动力向民营经济转移的所有制障碍,增强吸纳国有企业存量劳动力和社会新增劳动力的能力。吉林省作为一个农业大省,农村剩余劳动力庞大;同时,作为国家老工业基地,国有企业改革所带来的下岗失业问题更为严峻。启动民营经济对缓解目前吉林省城乡就业压力、增加人民收入,进而带动消费和促进经济发展有着重要的现实意义。     

The Limited Effects of Federal Environmental Justice Policy on State Enforcement

The federal government adopted several measures during the mid-1990s to address concerns about race-based and class-based disparities in environmental protection. This article examines whether these measures affected the pattern of state enforcement of three federal pollution control laws. Using differences-in-differences models to estimate the effects of the federal policy adoption, I find evidence of increases in state enforcement of the Clean Air Act in large African-American communities, but declines in enforcement in communities with large poor and Hispanic populations. Similarly, there is evidence that state enforcement of the Clean Water Act decreased in poor and African-American communities, but there were no real changes in enforcement of facilities regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Collectively, the analysis suggests that the federal policy had minimal positive effects on state regulatory enforcement.     

'Negotiation as simultaneous equation': building a new partnership with Africa

The value–added of a new partnership with Africa lies precisely in the opportunity to manage and to give impetus to relations and negotiations across a whole range of issues—conflict management, trade, debt relief, and aid—taken together rather than separately. Partnership, however, is not a new concept, in general or in development, and there are different models on offer. This article reviews these and sets out the choices facing new African partnerships with respect to a) participation b) coverage c) the form of partnership, and d) the structure of partnership. The article argues: against selectivity and in favour of building partnerships even with difficult cases; in favour of deploying all possible instruments, including economic, political and military; in favour of the principles of reciprocity and mutual accountability; in favour of institutionalizing mutual accountability through contractual or quasi–contractual forms. The characteristics of one particular, and far from easy case, Rwanda, reinforce these conclusions.
There are also implications for the G8 engagement with NEPAD. The article recommends a broad–based partnership, managed on the developed country side by the OECD, and that proposed monitoring by peer review be reinforced by joint parliamentary scrutiny.     

The Disappearing State and the Quasi‐Event of Immigration Control

Immigration enforcement by sheriffs and police can be characterized as a proliferation of quasi‐events which never quite rise to the status of an event. This poses distinct challenges for feminist‐inspired scholarship on the state which seeks to document, ethnographically, how the state goes about its business on the ground. In this article we draw on our fieldwork experience in North Carolina and Georgia on sheriffs’ and police departments’ use of traffic enforcement and policing roadblocks to scrutinize drivers for their legal status, and ask how our ethnographic approach to the problem of state power inevitably stumbles in relation to the ordinariness of these practices. We conclude that feminist scholarship committed to an ethnography of the state could do much more to think through the potentially aporetic quality of that which is our common object of research—the state in practice.     

From Force to Legitimation: Rethinking Land Grabs in Cambodia

This article moves beyond a focus on the brute force involved in high‐profile land grabs to examine the way legitimation, regulation and coercion intersect in Cambodia's property regime. It builds on the ‘powers of exclusion’ framework developed by Hall, Hirsch and Li to argue that increased connections within civil society in Cambodia and engagement with Western commodity markets have motivated state and private concessionaires to use different means of land exclusion, with less outright force and a greater focus on repressive regulation and legitimation. These exclusionary powers work through informal political connections, secrecy and obfuscation, which the authors term the ‘power of informality’. This argument is substantiated with two case studies that illustrate a move away from the dominant narrative of forceful expulsion of land users in Economic Land Concessions (ELC) towards approaches that provide in‐kind compensation and carve out land for smallholders: a recent land titling campaign in ELC areas, and the first oil palm ELC to gain responsible investment certification. While the authors remain cautious of the implications of this shift, given the persistence of the power of informality, these cases illustrate the potential for new forms of state–society relations: a shift from fear of authorities to a demand for greater accountability and responsiveness.     

The State We're in on the Eve of World Archaeological Congress (WAC) 6: Archaeology in Ireland vs Corporate Takeover and a Reply from University College Dublin

Abstract

There has been a change in how the state in Ireland uses archaeology since the 1990s, when it began collaboration with the private sector on large-scale development. Most archaeologists are now employed by private companies on temporary, short-term contracts. As in other countries, this has happened in tandem with increasing bureaucratic, corporate control of universities and pressure on academics to orient teaching to meet the needs of industry. This is an inevitable expression of expansion by multi-national corporations, often part of the ‘spreading democracy’ which, updating a famous phrase, can be characterised as a US-led ‘war by other means’. I present a case study of that process unfolding in one country, focusing on road development, the corruption upon which it is necessarily founded, and the role of archaeology. The M3 motorway which threatens the landscape of the Hill of Tara provides a good example. Crucial questions of professional ethics and standards, particularly professionals’ accountability to the community, have been sidelined. WAC 6 will be held in University College Dublin in June 2008; this congress will be pivotal because WAC will decide for or against archaeologists’ accountability to communities and their life-or-death struggle for survival, and for or against embedding the profession with cultural destruction in the private sector. A reply from University College Dublin follows this article.     

Tourism–conservation enterprises as a land-use strategy in Kenya

Since the early 1990s, nature conservation organizations in Eastern and Southern Africa have increasingly attempted to integrate their objectives with those of international development organizations, the land-use objectives of local communities and the commercial objectives of tourism businesses, in order to find new solutions for the protection of nature and wildlife outside state-protected areas. The increased inclusion of the market in conservation initiatives has led to diverse institutional arrangements involving various societal actors, such as private game reserves, conservancies and conservation enterprises. The Koija Starbeds ecolodge in Kenya – a partnership between communities, private investors and a non-governmental organization – serves as a case study for emerging institutional arrangements aimed at enabling value creation for communities from nature conservation. Based on a content analysis of data from individual semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews, as well as a document and literature review, this article reveals a range of benefits for community livelihood and conservation. It also identifies a range of longer term governance challenges, such as the need to address local political struggles, the relations between partners and transparency and accountability in the arrangement.     

Making the IMF and the World Bank more Accountable

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (the Bank) are now regularly accused of being secretive, unaccountable and ineffective. Not only radical non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but equally their major shareholders are demanding that the institutions become more transparent, more accountable and more participatory. Accountability, in particular, has become the catchcry of officials, scholars and activists in discussing the reform of the institutions. Yet few attempts have been made to dissect the existing structure of accountability within the international financial institutions (IFIs), to explain its flaws and to propose solutions. That is the aim of this article. The first section examines the structure of accountability planned by the founders of the IMF and the World Bank. The second section discusses the defects in this structure. Section three analyses recent attempts to make the institutions more accountable. The conclusion offers some recommendations for improving the institutions, and a warning about the limits of accountability at the international level.     

Disease outbreaks and health governance in the Asia-Pacific: Australia's role in the region

The revised International Health Regulations (IHR) entered into force on 15 June 2007. In accordance with this new international treaty, every member state of the World Health Organization has been given five years in which to review their existing health systems and structures, and where necessary, improve their capacity for the detection, reporting, assessment of, and response to public health emergencies of international concern. Of course, for developed countries, it is unlikely that establishing and maintaining these core capabilities will be difficult. For many less developed countries, however, the revised IHR obligations pose a challenge on a number of fronts. This article explores some of the challenges that less developed countries face in meeting their new IHR obligations prior to discussing the role that the Australian government can play in assisting its Asia-Pacific neighbours achieve these measures.     

Citizenship, accountability and community: the limits of the CSR agenda

While the issue of the role of the private sector in development is very much on the agenda of donors and governments, mainstream Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) debates continue to neglect questions with regard to the accountability of companies to the communities in which they invest. Liberal notions of CSR place great emphasis on voluntary, partnership and market based approaches to tackling social and environmental problems and managing conflict. While the rise of voluntary standards and codes of conduct in the North and the growing popularity of various forms of 'civil regulation' has improved the responsiveness of corporations to social and environmental issues, there are doubts about their transferability or relevance in many southern settings. This is particularly so when viewed from the perspective of communities pursuing corporate accountability in the absence of donor, NGO or government pressure for company reform. It is in these 'majority world' settings that we encounter the limits of the liberal CSR agenda.
This article therefore explores the different tools that poorer communities have developed in order to construct mechanisms of corporate accountability. Recent work in India is drawn upon to ground the analysis, but reference is made to many other cases in different regions of the world and across a variety of sectors. It is suggested that many state-based, community-based and company-based factors determine the likely success of such initiatives. Power disparities and how to contest them emerge as key, however, and their neglect within mainstream CSR approaches undermines their ability to address issues of corporate accountability in situations characterized by sharp inequities in power. The emphasis here is on the process of promoting corporate accountability, and the relations of power that underpin these, rather than the achievement of more narrowly defined indicators of corporate performance.