Corporate social responsibility and sustainability of local community : a case study of the transnational project in China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

Sun, Zhe and Jai, Kumar and Zhao, Liang (2019) Corporate social responsibility and sustainability of local community : a case study of the transnational project in China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Sustainability (Switzerland), 11 (22). 6456. ISSN 2071-1050 (https://doi.org/10.3390/su11226456)

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Abstract

While achieving great benefits, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has triggered potential problems between the transnational projects and local communities in the participant countries. However, there is still a knowledge gap on how corporate social responsibility (CSR) is adopted, and how CSR affects the local community. Based on a context of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), this research exploits a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to fill the gap. It finds that the CSR activities in the CPEC project are initiated by the long-term CSR initiative. Organized by the professional CSR foundation in an autonomous environment, the panoramic CSR activities are governed in a discretionary way and focus exclusively on the sustainability of the local community. Education, health-care, environment, and employment improve greatly after the implementation of the CPEC project. Theoretically, this research not only provides new insights into CSR research by taking an under-studied context of CPEC into study, but also proposes a mechanism of how CSR leads to the sustainability of local community by building a CSR-sustainability framework.

ORCID iDs

Sun, Zhe, Jai, Kumar and Zhao, Liang ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8481-9926;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)