CSR in Africa: be part of it!

Today we have another guest post from our long-term friend and collaborator, Laura Spence, who is just back from the African Academy of Management Conference and had some reflections we thought would be good to share.
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Given the laudable aims of corporate social responsibility protagonists - I guess, roughly speaking, to make the world a better place - you have to wonder why so much time and effort is put into understanding social responsibility in places where really, let’s face it, the social problems are not really that big.

Should we be stressing about which company sponsors school sports equipment, or would we be better occupied to worry about schools which have no books? Is corporate lobbying one of life’s big issues or could it rather be the conflation of corporations and governments, systemic bribery, corruption and nepotism? Should we be fretting about diversity training in head offices or focusing on situations where gender, race, class, caste, religious and tribal differences mean staggering inequalities in opportunities are ingrained? It paints a pretty miserable picture when you think about it.

For all this, understanding developing and emerging countries need not be a miserable enterprise. I have just come back from the fabulous African Academy of Management (AFAM) Conference in Botswana, with renewed understanding of social responsibility – or at least a whole new set of questions to ask.

Discussion around the conference was not so very different in many respects to other Academy events, but one thing kept surfacing – we might list the relative importance of issues in developing country contexts, but is there a different philosophical starting point? Are the frameworks based on Western capitalist systems of any real help outside of the ‘West’?

As is the way of things sometimes, a glimmer of an answer came for me in one of the few moments we had to get outside of the conference. We visited, by chance, a small exhibition of local artists’ work relating to the fight against HIV/AIDs. It was produced under a cross-sector partnership between government and a local NGO with the Tswana strap line ’Nna le sea be’. This roughly translates as ‘Be part of it’.

It is just a tourist-eye view of mine of course, but this felt different to me, not an approach I would expect to see elsewhere. There is something special about the local push for the acceptance of problems and drive to pull people together to join in and be a part of the solution, reflected through a local saying used in equal measure to help someone pick up something they have dropped, or work together to reduce the tragedy of HIV/AIDS. Surely this has implications for CSR in Africa.

Alongside this, another important realisation was the different pace in Botswana. Time and again when waiting for some service or other to be provided, one is met with ‘It’s coming’ or better still ‘Tomorrow’. It is a reminder how hung up some cultures are with everything being just so, preferably yesterday. When the pace of life slows, this does seem pretty absurd, but it also acts as a reminder that transferring expectations from one part of the world is a misguided approach to just about anything, not least CSR. It is likely to be far more helpful to learn from local perspectives, achievements and solutions. But patience might be needed.

My reason for being in Botswana was as part of the team offering a PhD training workshop and a stream on small and medium sized enterprises and social responsibility in developing countries funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. We have six seminars planned for 2014 and 2015, a book and as a result of the fascinating time had at AFAM 2014, we will be wrapping up our project at AFAM2016 in Ethiopia.

Nna le seabe.

Laura J. Spence

Culture clash in business-NGO partnerships

Ten years ago last month, Jem Bendell published what turned out to be one of the most influential books yet on business-NGO partnerships called Terms for Endearment: Business, NGOs and Sustainable Development. To mark the anniversary, the publisher Greenleaf is offering a big discount on the book (50% off) and making a number of the chapters free to download. Included in the free chapters is Andy's chapter, "Culture clash and mediation: exploring the cultural dynamics of business-NGO collaboration". We're really pleased to see this and some of the other chapters made freely available. The book itself was a great collection of articles and it really helped kick start a critical perspective on partnerships and an engagement from the academic community with the political ramifications of corporate responsibility practice - a theme that regular readers will notice that we've become ever more interested in.

So in support of the anniversary Andy has written a blog post reflecting on writing the chapter all those years ago. The post will go up on Jem's website Lifeworth.com sometime later this month, but he's agreed for us to publish it here first. So here it is - and don't forget head over to Greenleaf and download some classic chapters for free. 

"If truth be told, I discovered business-NGO partnerships pretty much by accident. I was trying to complete my PhD, which was about the “amoralization” of corporate greening. That is, how business involvement in sustainability was accompanied by some form of removal of moral framing and content. I’m not just talking the business case, though that was certainly a major part of it. But also how even social mission companies sometimes failed to morally engage their employees in green business. Or how middle managers in companies would try to make environmental issues as normal and unthreatening to their colleagues as possible. “The environment” my respondents basically seemed to be telling me, was “not ethics”.

I ran into the WWF Plus Group, which is the partnership that I examine in the chapter that is included in Terms for Endearment, because one of the companies I was writing a case study on was involved in the initiative. The Plus Group (a working group seeking to implement the Forest Stewardship Council accreditation scheme in the UK) seemed to me to be an especially interesting context to explore the kinds of questions that I was interested in. Here, I sensed, the moral complexion of the different partners might come into sharp relief. Not exactly a “good” NGO facing up to a whole bunch of “bad” companies like some latter day cowboy story. But certainly plenty of potential for a collision of moral worldviews – or more broadly culture clash as the chapter title puts it.

So I got deeper and deeper into the initiative, and became invigorated by exploring the cultural dimensions of business-NGO partnerships. A number of researchers had alluded to the potential for culture problems to arise, but no one had investigated them in any real depth. In the end, I got so into it that, like a badly behaved guest, I probably wound up staying longer than I was supposed to. But I also think that the kind of work I was doing was necessary to move our knowledge up a level.

Looking back now, I think that the chapter still holds up well. It shows that there are different ways of thinking about culture with respect to partnerships, which is a point still missed by many people who study the phenomenon. In that respect, I think it’s great that Greenleaf is making the pdf of the chapter freely available. It will help to disseminate the more critical approach to culture that the piece showcases.

And then there are the insights I provide about the role played by ‘cultural mediators’ in managing cultural translations across and within organizations. At the time that I was writing the chapter, more than a decade ago, this seemed fresh and new. It captured a very real and, I think, important dynamic at play in partnerships. In fact, I’ve had a number of practitioners over the years that have the read the piece saying, ‘yes, that’s exactly what I do!”

So the identification of cultural mediators, and my analysis of the role they play in this complex cultural milieu of partnerships, still rings true. Actually today, it’s much more commonplace for partnering organizations to go so far as to formally identify such a role: NGOs have partnership managers; companies have stakeholder relationship managers and other similar posts. But if we peer beneath the surface, we’ve still got a long way to go before we really understand what’s going on here.

That said, I’ve been heartened in the last few years to see some interesting studies emerging which really help us to see these deeper cultural dynamics more clearly. May Seitanidi, for instance, explores in her recently published book, The Politics of Partnerships, the dangers posed by seeking partners with too great a cultural fit, and the limits to meaningful change imposed by managing away conflict. Bahar Ali Kazmi, who is completing his PhD at the University of Nottingham, has been looking at how cultural mediators operate among different moral logics in the realization of human rights in developing countries. So there’s a lot of great work going on. And I expect that in another 10 years time, we’ll be looking back at how the research of these emerging scholars has helped shape the evolving field of business-NGO partnerships."

Climate change and the bottom line ... even in Canada?

Canada is no frontrunner in tackling climate change. In fact, in many respects, it is quite the reverse. So we were pleased to see the release of WWF Canada's report "Rethink Business How Addressing Climate Change Can Improve The Bottom Line" which looks at what some of the country's leading companies are doing to address climate change in their organizations.In fact we were so pleased that Andy agreed to write the forword for the report. Here's a sample of what he says:

"For Canadian business, the threat of climate change looms large. Nonetheless, despite its reputation as a clean, eco-loving country of verdant forestsand sparkling rivers, Canada remains a major laggard in climate protection. According to official statistics, it has one of the highest rates of per capita CO2 emissions of any country in the world. The conditions for a major change in this situation are hardly propitious either. The  economy is wedded to fossil fuels, and the federal government has been reluctant to tackle the problem of climate change through national regulation. It is clear that we need to look elsewhere for meaningful change.

Hotels, soft drinks, information technology, and paper – these might not be the obvious places to look for leadership in climate solutions in the country. However, this report demonstrates that these are indeed some of the industries where a quiet Canadian revolution is beginning to take shape. Each of the companies featured here – Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, The Coca-Cola Company, Hewlett-Packard Canada, and Catalyst Paper – have demonstrated a willingness to take a step beyond their industry rivals. They have all made an  impressive commitment to reduce absolute levels of greenhouse gas emissions. And they have each  demonstrated in their own way that doing so can also make good commercial sense. Their performance is far from perfect. But these companies can all point to significant progress that sets a benchmark for others to follow."

So the bottom line is that some of these leaders are doing some great stuff .... but there's still a long, long way to go, especially considering that these are in front of many of their competitors. If you want to read more about what these companies have done and the challenges they've faced, the whole report is downloadable for free, or you can also just download excerpts. One of the most interesting aspects for us though is that the report is based on a business collaboration implemented by WWF called Climate Savers that seeks to combine the efforts of the NGO and its corporate members to achieve meaninful carbon reductions. As Andy says in the foreword:

"The decision to take a lead on climate change is not taken lightly. WWF’s Climate Savers program, though, is a great example of what can be achieved when businesses and non-profit organizations decide to work together to achieve common goals. Such partnerships are tough to get right. Different priorities, a clash of  values, alternative ways of seeing the world: these can all derail the best-laid plans for collaboration. But  WWF Climate Savers program works because it offers a framework for action that is animated by a set of clearly articulated goals....The Climate Savers program is not just about targets, though. What Climate Savers does is provide support, advice, evaluation, and perhaps most importantly, a forum for the exchange of ideas and the communication of progress, that enables the program participants to better achieve
their goals."

We're not saying it's a panacea for tackling climate change, but challenges this big require collaborative action. And they demand a willingness to open up. And that's exactly what the Climate Savers initiative gets business in the habit of doing. It's a pity that the only way they seem able to do this is by appealing to business self-interest (as in "how addressing climate change can improve the bottom line"), but sure, there is a necessity for voluntary climate action to make some kind of commercial sense ... its just not the whole story. But if you're reading a blog about corporate responsibility, you probably didn't need us totell you that.