Despite the ongoing difficulties across the global South for workers seeking to secure their rights, work on improving corporate responsibility has been moving on apace. The Chilean Benchmarking Group has been created to identify, study and promote good practices of corporate community involvement initiatives in Chile. An initial report by the group suggests that, 'despite the success of corporate citizenship programs in the US and Europe, it must not be assumed that external models can be imported for direct application to Chile, nor to any other developing country'. 20 Meanwhile, New Africa Capital has developed an 'empowerment index' to measure progress in the areas of employment equity, corporate social involvement, skills development and control. The tool, which aims to measure actual results that have been achieved within companies rather than aspirations or goals, was created by an in-house team with the participation of various stakeholders and is currently being piloted within the group.

In Asia, TERI, the Tata Energy Research Institute, organised the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit as advance preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development later this year in Johannesburg, South Africa. 21 Also in preparation for the summit, the Centre for Social Markets is establishing an initiative to get local enterprises from the South to take part in a 'Southern Business Challenge'. One of the initial aims of the challenge is to provide a business voice at the summit in Johannesburg other than large, Western multinationals.

In Manila, a partnership between the Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP) Centre for Corporate Citizenship and the British Council organised a lecture for small and medium-sized enterprises exploring the possibility of CSR as an alternative model for global competitiveness. This was in preparation for 'CSR Week' in the Philippines, which was scheduled for July. The week-long event, to be led this year by PBSP, the Asian Institute of Management and the League of Corporate Foundations, was an initiative of former President Estrada. The week will include a one-day workshop in Manila co-ordinated by the United Nations Volunteer (UNV) programme and the New Academy of Business. The workshop is part of an action research project, Enhancing Business–Community Relations, which the New Academy is currently co-ordinating with UNV in seven Southern countries: India, South Africa, Brazil, the Philippines, Lebanon, Ghana and Nigeria. The programme is developing practices for corporate responsibility in these regions and includes a series of national workshops between April and September in each of the countries. 22

In Lebanon UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)/UNV, Schtroumpf, FTML-Cellis, Tetra Pak and Coca-Cola Middle East are jointly launching a new project to increase awareness of corporate social responsibility and environmental protection. The partnership will seek to promote Schtroumpf's second 'Go Green' contest between March and July, targeting close to 20,000 students in major universities of Lebanon. Another exercise in awareness-raising of corporate responsibility is due to take place in Ghana in March, where another UNV project is aiming to sensitise and build the capacity of local youth groups, community and opinion leaders to demand corporate accountability.

Initiatives tackling corporate reporting have also been moving ahead in the South. In Taiwan, ten member companies of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development–Taiwan (Repub-lic of China) completed environmental reports based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Guidelines. The reports have been compiled into a single document: Sustainable Care: Roadmap to the Green Century, written in Chinese. 23

South African Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel, welcomed a study on socially responsible investment (SRI), suggesting that SRI has an important role to play in the country's investment landscape. In response to the lost decades of development (the 1980s and '90s), African heads of state have been developing a project to engender a renaissance in the continent's fortunes under the name of New Partnership for Africa's Development. With the first Annual African Corporate Citizenship Convention in April in Johannesburg 24 and the second World Summit on Sustainable Development later in the year, it may be in the context of African rejuvenation that the CSR community will be most challenged to demonstrate its usefulness and validity. This New Partnership initiative has emphasised the potential role of foreign direct investment in the process of helping Africa to play a more equal role in the global economic game. Africans are in need of vital goods and services through strengthened local cycles of economic activity. However, one of the last things that they probably need is a new colonial force of consultants, advisers and practitioners ready to offer 'help' that reinforces existing power and knowledge structures, extracts money from the local economies and draws down the stock of common environmental, cultural and social good.

Can the CSR community shape innovations such as SRI to contribute to a form of people-centred, environmentally sustainable development rather than merely to replicate the problems of externally driven neoliberal economic volatility?