In this paper I take a ‘political settlements’ approach to examining the political effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries. The political settlements approach uses an integrated understanding of politics, power and institutional forms to explain how, given different political processes and incentives, the same institutional forms can produce different economic and developmental outcomes. I apply this lens to the CSR practices of large mining companies in developing countries, examining their impacts on local and national political settlements using the Zambian metals mining sector as a case study. Directly, CSR features little in the national debate on natural resource governance in Zambia but local CSR activity is considerable. I find that the CSR practices of large metals mining companies influence the governance of extraction and the possibility of inclusive development with notable consequences for institutions of traditional leadership. The resulting pattern of inclusion and development is argued to result from the interaction of two processes – elite bargaining and coalitions within exclusionary political settlements on the one hand, and CSR practices shaped by risk management on the other. I conclude by arguing that political settlements literature offers a rich seam for future research in the extractive sector if its limitations are addressed.

Introduction

The local development impacts of large scale mining have been long argued to be poor. One strategy to improve local development outcomes has been to adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes for community development by mining companies. The literature on these is ambivalent about their development impacts (Campbell, 2009; Gardner, 2016; Hilson, 2012; McEwan et al., 2017; Rajak, 2011; Sharp, 2006; Slack, 2012; Van Teijlingen, 2016). One under-explored aspect of this is the political impacts of CSR programmes; the effect they have on local and national political configurations. This has been a growing concern in critical social sciences, particularly anthropology (Banks et al., 2013; Gardner, 2016; Rajak, 2011). While in management and business studies there have been recent high-profile moves to examine ‘political CSR’ (Frynas and Stephens, 2014), little of this is based on empirical work and, I would argue, often retains an anaemic understanding of politics centred on institutions rather than power relations and struggle. In this paper I take a different approach to explore the politics of corporate social responsibility in the mining sector in Zambia, drawing on literature on ‘political settlements’. A series of high-profile books by respected authors in politics and economics on the political settlements approach, has brought ideas of the politics of development in the longue-durée to the forefront of contemporary development thinking (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012; Fukuyama, 2011; North et al., 2013). These books, each with their own lexicon and specificities of argument, all share “one common proposition: that politics and institutions are the crucial determinants of developmental outcomes” (Laws and Leftwich, 2012, p. 20). They argue that development outcomes are not a function of institutional performance per se, but of the deeper political struggles and configurations which shape how institutions perform. In this paper I use ideas from this recent literature to examine the role of corporate social responsibility in the extractive industry in promoting inclusive development in Zambia. I address two main questions: (1) How do the CSR practices of large metals mining companies affect local and national political settlements? And, (2) How do political settlements help us understand the politics of CSR? This includes exploring how CSR initiatives affect the discursive framing of political settlements in the extractive sector and how CSR initiatives shape local political settlements with important institutional and development consequences. In the Zambian case, I show that the CSR practices of large metals mining companies impacted the governance of extraction; while they have limited national impact, they do have important local impacts.