Paper short abstract:

To ensure that Uganda can harness its new oil wealth for sustainable development, CSR activities by multinational oil companies are encouraged to ensure that project benefits are shared with communities. This paper explores the extent to which activities shaped by local needs and demands.

Paper long abstract:

There is increasing pressure on international oil and mining companies from host governments and local communities to ensure that benefits from extractives projects are shared. To ensure that Uganda can harness its newly discovered oil wealth for sustainable development and poverty reduction, an agenda of 'good resource governance' is being promoted by donor governments, international institutions and civil society organisations, and an agenda of 'national content' is being promoted by the Ugandan government. Within these agendas CSR (corporate social responsibility) activities carried out by multinational oil companies are encouraged to ensure that project benefits are shared with communities, including jobs, infrastructure and community development. This paper explores the CSR activities of two multinational oil companies operating at the subnational level in Uganda; UK / Irish Tullow Oil and China's CNOOC and asks to what extent are the activities shaped by local needs and demands. Findings concur with other critical studies of CSR in extractives which find that CSR is unable to play a substantial role in promoting long-term and equitable social development. Whilst there is evidence in Uganda to suggest that corporate activities and projects can be influenced by local pressures, findings reinforce that CSR projects have a technical focus and the benefits to communities often are short term and contingent. The idea of corporate responsibility needs to shift towards the obligations of companies and relations of accountability between society, state and private actors to ensure that local people can benefit from oil development.

Paper short abstract:

The paper argues that corporations deploy the 'power of presence' to influence national policies and practices for promoting sugarcane in Zambia. Drawing on two smallholder sugarcane projects, interpretations, divergences and incompatibilities in development objectives among actors are assessed

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses interview and community assessment data to discuss national policy and institutional frameworks for promoting sugarcane in Zambia and its implications on sustainable rural development. We focus on two sugarcane schemes under the multi-national corporation Illovo to highlight national motives and strategies for promoting sugarcane and consequences on patterns of rural poverty and livelihoods. The paper argues that policies and practices for promoting sugarcane have produced an uneven agribusiness-oriented industry structure. Corporations deploy the 'power of presence' to influence national-level policies and practices within market structures and in communities. National investment and trade policies and the Zambia National Sugar Adaption Strategy foster sugarcane expansion but the Strategic Environmental Assessment points to serious environmental implications. The government promotes smallholder integration for poverty reduction and livelihood security whilst corporations can limit their participation. Current schemes provide a conduit for industrial resource exploitation whilst transforming rural land and water use, producing local inequalities, poverty and livelihood insecurities. By unpacking diverse actors in the industry, we show divergences in the meaning, framing and interpretation of sustainability as well as incompatibilities in development objectives: agriculture development/transformation, social-economic and environmental development and sustainability. We emphasise the role of domestic economic and environmental institutions in defining, localising and mediating standards that would expand the range of issues corporations deal with whilst placing, at its centre, local community interests.

Paper short abstract:

The authors theorise multi-stakeholder partnerships as a means to explore emerging spaces between established fields they bridge across, using network approaches to examine how the interactions of partners continuously structure partnerships; and the effect of initial conditions on partnering.

Paper long abstract:

Multi- stakeholder partnerships were given new impetus in 'Agenda 2030' which requires 'bringing together Governments, civil society, the private sector, the United Nations system and other actors' (UN: General Assembly, 2015). Much existing literature treats partnerships as either normatively appropriate or instrumentally useful organisational models. Rather than conceptualising partnerships as a stable model in which differently-located partners may engage, the authors use Eyal's (2011) theorisation of 'spaces between fields', which are co-constructed by partners.

To examine these emerging spaces as they institutionalise, it is vital to examine partnering processes as connecting diverse partners from established fields. Partnership Boards are at the sharp end of partnering activities, bringing together partners representing diverse logics, professional expertise, and values. Therefore, the authors used network analysis (specifically, the Interlocking Directorates approach) to investigate the relationships among partners across several global financing partnerships for the Sustainable Development Goals (including agriculture, climate change, education, health, and water).

This analysis revealed that Board members from donors (state, private and multilateral) were more connected within the partnership space than other stakeholders. This would indicate the importance of historical relations of power and the privileging of certain types of expertise and knowledge in the emerging institutionalisation of partnerships. This article contributes an innovative theoretical framing to studies of partnerships and extends the insights of Eyal's approach. By focussing on the actual relationships that sustain and structure spaces between fields, the authors demonstrate how initial conditions and power disparities in constituent fields are translated and imprinted into emergent liminal spaces.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reviews the cooperation between pharmaceutical companies and Least Developed Countries in relation to access to essential medicines which developed as a result of the MDGs. It investigates how the introduction of the SDGs has affected this cooperation and whether the LDCs have benefited.

Paper long abstract:

In 2009, Andrew Witty, the Chief Executive of GlaxoSmithkline (GSK), announced that GSK would help the poorest developing countries via a process of partnering with the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Similarly, in 2010 the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) recognised the costs of essential medicines in LDCs and indicated that many of its members were considering policies which would increase access to these medicines. These announcements are essentially derived from target five associated with Goal Eight of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which specifically mentioned cooperation between pharmaceutical companies and developing countries in terms of access to essential medicines. This paper investigates how this cooperation has developed with the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), how the SDGs have affected the cooperation and whether the LDCs have truly benefited from the process. It also investigates the reasons why pharmaceutical companies have been talking specifically about LDCs and assisting them in their access to medicines. It argues that the reason for this specific focus is due to a 'Geneva Connection' which resulted partly from to the access to medicines campaign in WTO in the early 2000s and to the coherence and strength of the LDCs in the international organisations in Geneva where the IFPMA, the World Health Association and the WTO are based, and partly from the international norm of special treatment for LDCs which is centred in Geneva.