Corporate social responsibility and development in South Africa: socio-economic contexts and contemporary issues.

This chapter will discuss historical contexts and contemporary issues in Corporate Social Responsibility in South Africa. Here, the private sector has been forced to adopt socially responsible policies that are more advanced than those in many of the richer economies; spending in Corporate Social Investment (CSI) far exceeds that of wealthier countries. This is due to the adoption of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) legislation, the set of affirmative action policies adopted by the post-apartheid government to give historically disadvantaged groups economic opportunity. Relationships between business and society in South Africa are thus significantly shaped by the country's divided history of colonialism and apartheid, as well as by its present developmental challenges. Indeed, given that big business was one of the main beneficiaries of the Apartheid regime, it was ironically apartheid and the social unrest that it brought about that first stimulated corporate social responsibility practices in the country. Today, any South African company's performance is rated on a number of BEE scorecards, with companies collecting points for Corporate Social Responsibility. Although corporate involvement in development is usually portrayed as diametrically opposed to the state's involvement, the South Africa government has a very active role in defining and motivating CSR. At the same time, CSR funding is becoming ever more vital for the non-profit sector, with NGOs receiving an average of 20 % of their income from corporations. Moreover, CSI spending in 2012 by the top 200 South African companies alone amounted to a total of R7 billion, of which over a third was channelled through non-profit organisations. These complex intersectoral relationships under the banner of CSR have led to a maturing and professionalisation of companies? CSR strategies and practices in recent years, which this chapter will outline with reference to recent scholarship and to original research by the author

Reparations and the politics of waiting in Kenya.

This article examines transitional justice in Kenya, drawing on interviews and focus groups with survivors of the post-election violence of 2007–2008. Focusing particularly on the experiences of women and internally displaced persons (IDPs), it explores how survivors understood and negotiated waiting for reparations and analyses the effects of temporal uncertainty (around timing and scope) and of inequality (in relation to waiting times). Uncertainty and inequality contributed to survivors’ senses of passivity and exacerbated their feelings of marginalisation. To delay reparations for an uncertain time contributes to senses of continuity with the past, which transitional justice precisely seeks to disrupt. However, the study also demonstrates that waiting is not only endured, but at times actively resisted or rejected, which might be understood as a claim to ownership of local peace and exercise of peacebuilding agency but also as resistance against the dominant temporality of transitional justice. By framing survivors’ experiences with the scholarship on time and power and the “politics of waiting”, the research contributes to the literature on local experiences and understandings of transitional justice and to recent debates around its temporalities

If you don't count, you don't count: monitoring and evaluation in South African NGOs.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are increasingly challenged to demonstrate accountability and relevance, with reporting, monitoring and evaluation arguably having become development activities in their own right. Drawing on interviews and observation research, this article examines the impact of intensified monitoring and evaluation (M&E) requirements on a number of South African NGOs. M&E - and the types of expertise, vocabularies and practices it gives rise to - is an important area that is usually neglected in the study of NGOs but that significantly impacts on NGOs' logic of operation. By focusing on three areas - data that are considered appropriate to conduct M&E, staffing and organizational cultures, and NGOs' reformist relationships with other civil society organizations (CSOs) - M&E is revealed as a central discursive element in the constitution of NGOs appropriate to neoliberal development. By engaging a neo-Foucauldian framework of governmentality, M&E practices are thus understood as technologies through which governing is accomplished in the trans-scalar post-apartheid development domain

Forgiveness and the practice of compromise in post-apartheid South Africa.

Forgiveness has become a striven-for societal goal in post-conflict societies in the past decade or two. The rise of 'policies of forgiveness' can, for instance, be illustrated by the increasing popularity of truth commissions to deal with past human rights violations. In this context, forgiveness is advocated as part of a measures to deal with past human rights violations and as a means to reconciliation. In relation to the sociology of compromise, the capacity for forgiveness is one of a number of mediating factors that make it easier for people to live together after conflict and to practice tolerance; other such mediators include the ability to transcend divided memories of the former conflict, senses of the fairness of the concessions, trust and, perhaps most crucially the social networks in which people are located

Business and social peace processes: how can insights from post-conflict studies help CSR to address peace and reconciliation?

Private sector activities have often been linked to the fuelling of conflict and violence. At the same time, there has been growing interest in the contributions that the business sector can potentially make to peace, both from within academia (for example the 'peace through commerce' literature) and in the global institutional realm (for example the Business for Peace agenda). Proponents of such approaches claim that businesses have roles to play not only in contributing to growth and socio-economic development, but also in resolving or preventing conflict. But what is meant by peace? The chapter engages the insights of post-conflict scholarship in order to employ a more holistic concept of peace, arguing that sustainable peace relies on the success both of a political and a social peace process. Social peace processes involves social transformation that goes beyond the ending of violence. The chapter asks how companies? CSR activities can actively support such social peace processes and address the specific challenges of post-conflict societies, while critically engaging with some of the discourses that are central to the recent business for peace agenda. In reviewing current examples for CSR programming in post-conflict areas, it is demonstrated that social issues around reconciliation and reconstruction are frequently neglected

Women's experiences of peacebuilding in violence-affected communities in Kenya.

Despite the attention to gender and conflict in empirical positivist peace research, and the interest in local agency in recent peacebuilding literature, women's understandings and lived experiences of peacebuilding are not necessarily well accounted for. This article, drawing on interviews, focus groups and observation research with 57 female victims/survivors of post-election violence in Kenya, provides an ethnographic study of women's largely informal peacebuilding activities, ranging from mediation and dialogue to economic empowerment. It analyses women's constructions and ways of making sense of being peacebuilders, demonstrating that, while participants employed dominant gender frames, they exerted considerable transformative agency in their communities. It argues that their 'gendered responsibility for peace' at community level is simultaneously empowering and disempowering. The research aims to increase understanding of the gendered nature of peacebuilding and the ways in which women exercise peacebuilding agency through a focus on their own voices and lived experiences

Freedom Betrayed: NGOs and the Challenges of Neoliberal Development in the Post-Apartheid Era

This thesis explores transformations in South African NGOs in the Post-Apartheid era. It focuses on two areas in particular that are often neglected in the study of NGOs: auditing and partnerships are increasingly core activities of NGOs and impact on their logic of operation and their location in wider civil society. In applying a governmentality framework to the neoliberalisation of development in South Africa, this research investigates how development provides a context for governmental technologies and what forms of NGOs they produce. A multi-method, multi-sited research strategy was employed that included in-depth interviews, observation research and other ethnographic techniques. South Africa's democratic transition and subsequent funding crises gave birth to a new, more streamlined NGO model which can be characterised by flexibility, fluency in auditing techniques and the ability to maintain multisectoral partnerships. Partnerships transform the activities and values of NGOs and provide a crosssectoral context for the circulation of particular auditing technologies and types of expertise. Indeed, it is argued that the entanglement of NGOs in intersectoral spaces is not only heightened by the prevalence of the partnership agenda in global development and in the new South Africa's reconciliation project, but that NGO activity very much produces these kinds of intermeshing spaces. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is shown to be a key demand of partnerships, thus further reinforcing an audit culture. NGOs, by acting as experts and translators of these apparently mundane techniques to other civil society organisations (CSOs), actively shape practices of development and may come to substitute for civil society. There is continuity between the partnership practices by which - contrary to their emancipatory claims - NGOs become more strategically and structurally embedded in the neoliberal order, and their own governing of CSOs such as the country's strong social movements. It is contended that this is particularly dangerous given the vast developmental challenges facing South Africa and the deeply felt betrayal of freedom's promises by the majority population

Paperwork, compassion and temporal conflicts in British social work.

While previous literature has examined time discourses in social work and demonstrated that social work is predicated on linear understandings of time, one area that has received little theoretical and empirical attention in the literature on time and social work is what effects various social work temporalities exert on the lifeworld of social workers and how they shape their working days. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with British social workers and employs an abductive approach to data analysis. By analysing the participants' experiences of time and work, the article identifies two temporalities that exist in social work practice, paperwork time and compassionate time. Paperwork time is linear, instantaneous and accelerated, requiring social workers to juggle multiple competing demands and needs. Compassionate time is more developmental and cyclical and requires slower engagement. The paper then discusses how social workers negotiated these contradictory temporalities and highlights the potentially negative effects of temporal conflicts on people's health, well-being and on social work practice at large

Children in peace-building and violence during political instability in a Kenyan informal settlement.

Despite increasing attention to a wide range of actors in conflict in the scholarly literature, the roles and experiences of children have been largely considered only in terms of their victimhood. Similarly, in global policy discourses, children and youth are predominantly understood in relation to their vulnerability and the protection of their rights, or alternatively as a threat to security (as is notable in ideas around the so-called youth bulge and violence). In this paper, we contribute to the emerging literature within peacebuilding that considers children both as actors in conflict and as potential agents of change. In particular, we link these arguments to debates about individual and community resilience in settings of regularised or long-term violence, and how children navigate through challenging relationships. Drawing on recent semi-structured interviews with community members who were classified as children during the events and older CBO youth leaders in Kibera, Nairobi, we examine perceptions and understandings of children's involvement in peacebuilding and in violence during the contested elections of 2017 in Kenya. Our findings highlight how children connect with interethnic resentments and aggressive behaviour, or develop higher levels of agency, in terms of overcoming such social learning and of peacebuilding activities. How children behave during the period of election tensions is being shaped by differing relationships and experiences, which are interwoven within ethnic, gender and place identifications. The paper concludes with considerations of children within peacebuilding and violent processes in the forthcoming 2022 elections

Temporalities of victimhood: time in the study of post-conflict societies.

Researchers in peace and conflict studies have rarely focused on time and temporality. This article seeks to extend the literature on the politics of victimhood by examining the context of a mature post-transition society, drawing on qualitative research with victims/survivors of gross human rights violations in South Africa. Two decades after the democratic transition, there is a prevalent understanding that it is finally time for victims to 'move on'. In contrast to the supposed linear temporality of peace processes however, the consequences of past violence continue to impact on interviewees' lives and are exacerbated by contemporary experiences of victimisation. I identify several areas of temporal conflict that characterise post-conflict societies: victimhood as temporary/ victimhood as continuous; the pace of national reconciliation/ the time(s) of individual healing; and the speed of a neoliberal economy/ the pace of social transformation. I also examine temporal inequalities that reflect broader socio-economic marginalisation, such as being made to wait for reparations. This temporal analysis of victimhood not only highlights the mismatch between victims' perceptions and needs and the expectations of broader society, but it also draws attention to the temporality of transitional processes and programmes at different social and institutional levels