Over the last decades, encouragement of business engagement with environmental and socio-economic development has gained prominence due to the perceived weakening of states and multilateral institutions against the forces of global capitalism. Different ways of encouraging changes in business behavior have been promoted, such as the formation of public/private partnerships, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and other forms of non-binding organizational arrangements. However, there is no real consensus on the desired role of business in development, what the best policies for global development are, or what “development” itself is and should be defined as. Indeed, precisely as a formal consensus has been reached on the broad agenda of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a narrower agenda focusing on industrialization, modernization, and economic growth is promoted by new actors, many originating in the Global South. This special issue asks how the emergence of new actors and the adaptation by global institutions affect the ways in which business engages with development. This introductory article positions the issue's contributions into three discussions: exploring issues of global coherence and division on key debates; understanding how new actors are reshaping the public-private divide; and assessing how disconnects within discourse on business and development can amplify negative societal consequences in fragile settings of weak governance.

Business has been involved in cooperation with multilateral organizations through public-private partnerships (PPPs) since the late 1990s. With their adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), multilateral institutions increasingly consider partnerships as a means to achieve their goals given their own limited implementation capacity. However, the global economic order has changed significantly since the first expansion of PPPs, particularly due to growing participation by non-western states and companies. This article asks how this shift has changed the eagerness to form partnerships, as well as their qualitative content. It analyzes the 3964 partnerships in the SDG partnership registry, focusing on the subset of them that includes business partners. We divide these into five groups: local implementation, resource mobilization, advocacy, policy, and operational partnerships. We study PPPs involving companies from different varieties of capitalism—private, market based forms, and state-led forms of capitalism. We find that PPPs are still dominated by companies and other actors from Western countries. Moreover, business participate more in U.S.- and Canadian-led partnerships than others. We also find strong differences regarding what category of PPPs that companies from different backgrounds engage in, and discuss the linkages between varieties of capitalism and PPP participation.

This article studies what I describe as “state-coordinated investment partnerships,” an investment modality central to the deployment of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These partnerships bring together state and business actors to export overcapacity and address infrastructural demands in underdeveloped markets. To do so, they require accumulation and sovereignty regimes that mirror, in contingent ways, similar social arrangements within China. The superposition of such regimes and the interests and social imaginaries of local actors produces forms of uneven and combined development and shapes the contours of the BRI's emerging developmental and geoeconomic footprints. The BRI exports also an elite development paradigm which promotes urbanization, connectivity and economic growth over participatory approaches. This paradigm projects a depoliticized version of China's present into the BRI's future to justify social and environmental dislocations, and shields Chinese firms from civil society scrutiny. My analysis rejects this elite perspective and favors a labor-centric approach that unearths the social foundations of the BRI. From this perspective, despite relevant differences in format, the BRI's quintessential investment modality is closely aligned to a contemporary global current of public-private partnerships endeavored to mobilize public resources and state power for the expansion of capitalist social relations.

There has been considerable attention in recent years on the close linkages between business, ethics, and economic development and how businesses not only have responsibilities to their shareholders but also to wider society. The growing power and influence of emerging economies has resulted in increased scholarly interest in China on studying the domestic political commitments to corporate social responsibility strategies (CSR), and their potential contribution to promoting the country's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative and thereby achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article explores the factors that influence CSR strategies and performance and examines whether we are witnessing the emergence of a new form of social responsibility among Chinese businesses that prioritizes sustainable development. In order to better understand how CSR strategies in China are being potentially reshaped and realigned with the SDGs, we examined the CSR reports and practices of selected Chinese companies both before and after the adoption of the SDGs at the United Nations in 2015. By focusing on the CSR-SDG linkages in China, our study contributes to a better understanding of state advocacy aimed at influencing corporate behavior on sustainable development.

A recent debate in the international CSR literature has focused on the question whether CSR serves as a mirror or a substitute of country-level governance. Advocates of the mirror view highlight the role of country level institutions to drive corporate social performance (CSP) levels, whereas proponents of the substitute view find companies to become more active in light of governance gaps. We contribute to this debate by moving the focus to a sample of 264 emerging economy and developing country companies and by comparing the relationship between country-level governance and CSP based on three different CSP dimensions, namely, emissions, human rights, and community performance. Whilst we find corporate emissions performance and human rights performance to align more closely with the mirror view, there is some indication that corporate community performance—possibly traced back to the longstanding tradition of corporate philanthropy in non-Western contexts—instead acts as a substitute to fill institutional voids. We discuss implications of our findings for research and policymakers.

How can we better understand the complex interaction effects that are triggered when businesses and international government agencies become partners in social development? To answer, this article presents field experiences of Heineken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and the United Nations Global Compact in Dubai, to show the impact of key multi-stakeholder business-development policies as experienced by millions of people. These cases help us understand business and sustainable development interactions by exploring existing research gaps regarding issues of discourse, guidance, and legitimacy. This article has four aims: (1) to show that business-development interactions are much more complex than most case studies are able to encapsulate; (2) to explore how unintended ripple effects of even the most promising “win-win” business-development policies can carry catastrophic consequences; (3) to illustrate the potential benefits of a novel methodology for future research on business, global governance, and sustainable development; and (4) to show how business and development concerns interconnect across and through the macro- and meso-levels of analysis down to local livelihood interactions and impacts. I contextualize these experiences to emerging scholarship, opening avenues for building theory and improving policy on business, development, and peace.

Rhetoric from both domestic and international policy actors equated foreign direct investment and robust business growth in Sierra Leone with an exit from fragility. To the contrary, the trajectory of private sector development experienced from 2002 to 2014 contributed to Sierra Leone's socio-political challenges, replicating in the contemporary period dynamics of grievance and exclusion that were root causes of the country's endemic instability and then civil war. This study challenges the practices and refines the ideas underlying the prevailing vision for business-led development in Sierra Leone and other fragile states. It links extensive documentation of the role of business in Sierra Leone with peacebuilding and statebuilding frameworks to present a novel perspective on the mechanisms of action of private sector development in contexts of persistent fragility. In doing so, it provides a foundation on which further theoretical propositions for the ordering of business-state relations in support of transitions from fragility to peaceful development can be developed and tested.