Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is supposed to benefit corporations but as well to foster the well-being of individuals, communities and society. However, there is still a lack of reliable evaluation results of CSR's effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, development researchers complain that, despite CSR's claim and implicit hypothesis of mutually beneficial impacts, business studies, notably when addressing CSR impacts on the poor, do not sufficiently understand and take account of well-being effects in the eyes of the poor. The paper at hand empirically analyses the effects of a CSR strategy on the reported well-being of poor villagers in rural India. For the case of the Bayer Crop Science Model Village Project (MVP) and based upon quantitative data from a panel survey of about 2300 villagers living in some 1000 households, both descriptive analyses and multivariate analyses in this paper indicate that the activities initiated within the Model Village Project have c. p. contributed to a significant improvement of the villagers' reported well-being from 2011 until 2014. This is confirmed firstly by comparing the well-being development in two model villages in which Bayer undertook a variety of initiatives with the corresponding well-being development in two control villages in which no activities were started. Secondly, this conclusion is also underlined by comparisons of reported well-being changes of MVP participants and non-participants within the model villages.

This paper adds to the empirical research on empowerment drivers by analysing the empowerment of women and men at the community level. Using micro-data from four villages in rural Karnataka/India, our econometric estimations confirm several predictions of Sen’s capability approach on potential determinants of empowerment. Education, decent employment, other-regarding agency goals, political networks, trust and fairness coincide with reported impact on community-level change. Gender-specific estimations demonstrate that most empirical drivers of empowerment are quite consistent for men and women in many respects. Some variables, however, notably higher education, correlate with community-level empowerment of men, but not of women, which emphasises different gender roles in rural Karnataka. These findings may help researchers and practitioners to further develop cause-related strategies to overcome major determinants of disempowerment in institutional village decision contexts in general as well as those which are gender-specific.