Corporations, the UN and Neo-liberal Bio-politics
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Dialogue
Corporations, the UN and Neo-liberal Bio-politics
EWA CHARKIEWICZ
ABSTRACT Ewa Charkiewicz shares with readers a think piece that puzzles out the ever increasing popularity of corporate social responsibility (CSR). She is interested in why it appealed so strongly to the UN and civil society and asks what problems did it help to solve, on what terms does it operate and in particular, how has the consent and engagement with the discourse on CSR been generated? She warns that there is a double game being played, and that behind the caring face of CSR a war is being played out against ‘bare life’ and peoples’ livelihoods. KEYWORDS Foucault; governance; NGOs; environment; livelihoods; energetics
Introduction Since 1970, the United Nations conducted a programme on transnational corporations in their headquarters in NewYork. One of key concerns to this office was to ensure that transnational corporation apply the same standards overseas, for instance in relation to accounting for profits, terms of employment or domestically prohibited toxic chemicals, as they do in the countries of origin. Efforts to develop binding agreements or a non-binding code of conduct for corporations turned to be unsuccessful. In 1992, the programme was moved to UNCTAD in Geneva, and a few years later, it was dissolved. In the late 1990s, the UN engaged with corporations again but on different terms. In 1996, Kofi Anan created an advisory council of CEOs, and in 1999 went to the World Business Forum in Davos to propose Global Compact with corporations. In 2002, Chevron signed an agreement with UNDP for community development in the Niger Delta. Earlier UNICEF signed an agreement with McDonalds. These changes at the UN correspond with the avalanche of commitments to corporate social responsibility (CSR) among business, governments, academia, and NGOs.
CSR family album In order to make sense of the appeal of the discourse on CSR, I have made an archive, an equivalent of CSR family album that registers events from the infancy of corporations in the seventeenth century, includes examples of historical regulations as well as debunked regulatory proposals, lists corporate statements, events, alarming reports on corporate performance, propositions on what is a socially responsible corporation, acDevelopment (2005) 48(1), 75–83. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100102
Development 48(1): Dialogue tors who enunciated and sustained this discourse, corporate and social disasters and litigation cases that mobilized it, as well as popular novels and Hollywood movies on corporations as villains. The archive provides a historical outline of the evolution of discursive formation called CSR.1 The political^theoretical framework of these thoughts on CSR draws on the work on Michel Foucault, and contributes to Foucauldian feminism (Schild, 2000; Rankin, 2001; McLead and Durrhem, 2002) and governmentality studies (Foucault, 1991, 2003; Gordon, 1991; Dean 1999, Rose, 1999). Michel Foucault was a French political philosopher who analysed the relations bet
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