CSR Through Responsible Leadership for Sustainable Community Development: A Developing Nation Perspective

Abstract

Responsible leadership focusing on sustainable community development (SCD) is a relatively new area of scholarly inquiry that goes beyond traditional leadership approaches and focuses on people, institutions, and societies. The antecedents and responsible leadership strategies of corporate social responsibility (CSR), particularly for extractive industries and their SCD programs, have received little attention in the CSR literature. This book chapter discusses how and why responsible leadership needs to be considered for CSR effectiveness to uphold SCD for developing nations. Based on a comprehensive literature review and the author’s extensive research, this chapter identifies a range of interconnected drivers and theories for responsible leadership, the importance of CSR implementation for developing nations, and SCD, highlighting the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It then focuses on the matrix and influence of responsible leadership, CSR, and SCD in emerging countries. Finally, this chapter refers to responsible leaders as the key facilitators and promoters of CSR for SCDs to clarify their actions and expectations. This chapter describes the scholarly literature on explicit and implicit CSR forms of extractive industries and the entire concept of responsible leadership based on stakeholder theory from the point of view of developing nations. In this way, it clarifies the role of the responsible leader in implementing and institutionalizing CSR. This chapter facilitates dialog and a constructive debate among educators, students, stakeholders such as universities, governments, corporations, news media, policymakers, and future researchers about SCD through CSR for responsible extractive industries. Developing nations’ perspectives on responsibility, CSR, and SCD have been overlooked and lack evidence. This proposed chapter outlines these relationships for future research and theory development.