CSR in South Africa is mainly focusing on corporate social investment. More recently however, CSR in South Africa is confronted with additional demand. The new challenges are driven by external and internal factors. From the internal side there is increasing demand to link CSR with South Africa’s BEE approach, while from the external side South Africa is expected to follow more intensively international CSR standards, including the new ISO CSR standard.

The envisaged empirical study intends to focus the research on the following issues:

• Overview about the state of the art of the international CSR Agenda

• Analysis of South Africa’s CSR approach , including the BEE concept

• Identification of the potential and the bottlenecks to promote the BEE concept within the existing CSR approach

• Analysis of the contribution and interaction of the various stakeholders (government, companies, business associations, NGOs and labour organisations) to strengthen CSR/BEE in South Africa

• For the empirical research the sample of companies will have a focus on transnational enterprises, in particular German companies operating in South Africa

• Identification of multilateral and bilateral development cooperation organisation’s potential to promote CSR/BEE in South Africa