Corporate Social Responsibility through Public-Private Partnerships : Implications for Civil Society and Women's Empowerment in India

Abstract: This study investigates how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects implemented through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) impact on the roles, relationship, responsibilities and agendas of the involved actors – the private sector, civil society and the state – and whether these can lead to women’s empowerment and the capacity building of civil society in India, through a case study of the CSR projects of the Indian wind power company Suzlon. The empirical findings in terms of women’s empowerment lead us to conclude that although the first dimension of power, the ‘power over’, reflected in unequal gender structures, only has been addressed to a minor extent through Suzlon’s CSR projects, women’s ‘power to’, ‘power with’ and ‘power from within’ have been enhanced significantly, particularly through the projects specifically aimed to address women’s empowerment. Further, to adequately enhance women’s empowerment requires addressing gender structures and the gender sensitization of men, and not only the capacities of women. Suzlon has contributed to the capacity building of civil society – the NGOs implementing the CSR projects - in terms of enhancing project sustainability, promoting NGO ownership of projects, decreasing donor dependency and enforcing long-term strategies, while some other aspects of capacity building largely have remained unaddressed. Although the respective actors in the PPPs generally are positive of the collaborations, our findings indicate that the state partly withdraws from its responsibility to further development while the private sector increasingly takes on the same. The risk of corporate control of the civil society agenda associated with PPPs is not confirmed by our study although civil society tends to bear the highest costs in PPPs, in terms of credibility losses and insecurity concerning project terms and funding. The findings further confirm the importance of ‘critical cooperation’ and ‘complementary core competencies’ in PPPs.