CHALLENGES AND INCENTIVES FOR CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC GOODS: AN AGRARIAN DISCOURSE

Abstract

Crisis of recent decade had proved many times the interconnectivity and interdependency among all actors, sectors and areas of concern throughout the globalized value chains. Today sustainable development strategies are under reconstruction by global governance bodies together with stakeholders from around the world, concerning the main issue of durable future. Agriculture as main provider of public goods, recently had experienced pressure from public society and entered the debates for an essential review of the underlying support principles, based on multifunctionality, which hardly meet the goals of sustainable development. Recently some evidence appeared that the gap between multifunctionality and sustainability might be closed with help of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The paper aims to disclose the challenges and incentives which accelerated the origination of CSR concept and related discussions in an agrarian discourse through the provision of public goods. Systemic analysis and synthesis of theoretical insights of foreign and local scientific literature and the methods of induction and deduction were applied to investigate the theoretical aspect and characteristics of CSR and public goods in agrarian discourse. Theoretical research results propose that the concept of CSR does provide a basis for further analysis and discussion concerning the role of agriculture as a subject of government support from a broader systems perspective, which means a shift in paradigms, emphasized by movement from the sectoral policy and agricultural support to a more inclusive place-based development.

Keywords: public goods, corporate social responsibility, agriculture, challenges, incentives.

Article DOI: http://doi.org/10.15544/RD.2015.120