Incidences of corporate-community conflict and human rights violation associated with the activities of Canadian extractive companies (CECs) abroad have led to debates at home about the social responsibility of CECs overseas and the role of the Canadian government in corporate social responsibility (CSR). In response to these debates, the Canadian government launched the Canadian national CSR strategy to steer the CSR agenda of CECs. This paper questions and problematizes governmental discourses within the national strategies as a basis for contributing to the debate on the role of government in CSR. We show that the Canadian national CSR strategy embodies the same neoliberal tendencies as the European governmental approach to CSR. However, while the Canadian government's approach to CSR emerged with an emphasis on self-regulation, it has now morphed into a form of enforced self-regulation. Hence, the Canadian government adopts both collaborative and confrontation strategies in its efforts to make self-regulation effective.
Although the global norms meant to guide corporate environmental human rights conducts have steadily improved, there have been limited efforts directed at exploring whether business‐related environmental human rights infringements have as a result reduced. To address this gap, this paper examines the extent to which mining companies meet their responsibility to respect human rights and ensure that environmental rights of community members in mining areas are not violated. By privileging community voices, the paper offers nuanced insight into why gaps continue to persist between corporate commitment to human rights objectives and community experience in areas of limited statehood (ALS). We show that weak governmental capacity, neoliberal business model, and differences in sociocultural logics mediate between corporate environmental human rights commitments and their conduct on the ground. The paper concludes by considering the theoretical implications for business and human rights in ALS.
This chapter presents findings from the Toronto Tikkun Youth Project participants about their community and civic engagement activities. Data was gathered through interviews with sixteen participants who were between 16 and 24 years old and were of varied ethnic and racial backgrounds. The chapter contributes to literature that challenges notions of youth apathy and shows the varied ways in which youth contribute to the development of their communities and to civic society, generally. Data from the project show the different ways that youth define community and civic engagement, as well as the divergent forms and motivation for participating in these activities. Notions of belonging to their community, desire to contribute, challenge stereotypes, and create meaningful futures for themselves, were mentioned as some of the reasons youth chose to engage in community life. The youth voices echoed in this chapter can be used to combat the ongoing notions about youth apathy and the decreasing level of youth community engagement. The data also shows the need for a more systematic mapping of youth engagement and their contribution to society. In this chapter, we present findings from data collected with youth in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), as part of the broader Tikkun Youth Project (2014-2017), with sites in Canada, Kosovo, and South Africa. The discussion presented herein is part of ongoing public and scholarly debates about youth civic engagement or lack thereof. In this chapter, we offer narratives that 189 | Youth Perspectives on Community Activism describe youth community activities alongside youth discussions of empowerment, advocacy, and their growing career/academic pathways through and because of their activities in community spaces. We define community engagement as activities that "engage youth in the civic life of their communities" (Zeldin, 2004, p. 632) and as "how an active citizen participates in the life of a community in order to improve conditions for others or to help shape the community's future" (Adler & Goggin, 2005, p. 242). We also work with Berger's (2009) categories of engagement, while acknowledging his stance that the notion of "civic engagement" per se is muddled and lacks scholarly clarity. Berger retains the notion of "engagement," whilst distinguishing between political, social, and moral engagements and between engagement in (activity without attention); engagement by (attention without activity); and engagement with (attention and activity). We find these categories helpful in discussing the ways or levels of engagement that youth referred to as part of their community life. Cammaerts, Bruter, Banaji, Harrison, and Anstead (2014) reported that a significant portion of youth channel their political activities towards their social movement and civil organizing; therefore, any discussion about youth community engagement must intersect discussion on political participation. By including discussions on Tikkun youth's political engagement, we also strengthen the debates about the diverge...
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