Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a polysemous and contentious notion. While some see it as a revolution in the way business engages its environment, others laments it equates to nothing more than corporate image management. Because of the centrality of the private sector in contemporary development strategies of donors, CSR has become the object of many public policies and much scholarly attention. We build a CSR model based on the contributions of Zadek, Porter and Kramer and use it to analyse how CSR can contribute to tackle the problem of global poverty and under-development. We argue that by aligning their CSR strategy to the development strategies of their investment host country, private actor could increase its developmental effectiveness while creating shareholder value. We then use that model to assess the potential impact of CSR for development in the extractive sector and to analyse the Canadian policy in this field.
