Corporate gift or political sacrifice? State-sponsored CSR and electricity provision in Guinean extractive enclaves

Abstract

Going beyond a static conceptualization of the mining enclave, recent research increasingly scrutinizes the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) schemes as a means of territorial entanglement. Several authors refer to the notion of the “corporate gift” to describe these control and coping strategies as well as the resulting power relations between companies and the population around the production facilities. In this article, we focus on electricity provision as an example for such a “gift”. Extensive field research in the Guinean mining areas of Siguiri, Kamsar, and Mambia showed that in all of these areas, the mining companies not only acted as “givers” of electricity, but also handed over the bill for this electricity provision to the state. Confronted with this curious fact of state-sponsored CSR, this article questions the foundations of the arguments around the notion of the corporate gift and comes to the conclusion that these three electrification projects were, at the same time, acts of “political sacrifice”. This concept points beyond the obvious conclusion that mining companies try to maximize their legitimization efforts in an increasingly competitive environment and underlines the role of the state in “company-community” relations and the maintenance of extractive enclaves.