| By Anthony Bebbington | Published in Corporate Social Responsibility: Discourses, Practices and Perspectives, pp. 97-115. Edited by R. Raman. London: Palgrave MacMillan. |
| Full text (PDF) |
Excerpt: In this chapter I reflect on ways of interpreting programmes of corporate social responsibility in the extractive industries sector. By extractive industries I am referring to economic activities that remove a natural resource from the environment, submit it to marginal or no processing, and then sell it on: industries such as mining, oil, gas, and timber extraction. My specific emphasis will be on the mining sector, with a geographical focus on the Andes, Peru in particular. Peru is especially interesting because, while it has a long history of mining, the extractive industries sector has grown at remarkable rates over the last fifteen years. This growth has been accompanied by changes in public policy, a proliferation of social conflicts, shifts in patterns of ownership and a rapid expansion of business-led social responsibility and community development programmes. This correlation in time is not accidental, and is relevant for any interpretation that one might offer of corporate social responsibility – both in its Andean form, and as a more general phenomenon.