| "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR) has become a catch phrase for oil firms world wide who wish to portray a more environmentally and socially accountable image. Yet, despite the increased time, money and manpower foreign oil firms have invested into CSR activities, the continuing criticism against these firms leads one to believe that progress is not being made. The purpose of this thesis is to address why BP and Exxon-Mobil have failed to translate their CSR principles into practice on the BTC and Chad-Cameroon pipelines. What the findings of this thesis suggest are that because CSR is not a priority for firms, and as such it has been relegated to a fundamentally window-dressing exercise divorced from the core pipeline operations, the previously accepted idea that firms can be trusted to regulate themselves through CSR needs to be called into question. |
