Paper short abstract:

Through a study of Rustenburg, global centre of platinum production, I explore how the corporate responsibility creates new economic inequalities while entrenching old social hierarchies, rendering the ideal of empowerment through enterprise that it expounds elusive for all but a few beneficiaries.

Paper long abstract:

Through an ethnographic study of Rustenburg, the urban hub of South Africa's platinum belt and global centre of platinum production, (once labelled the 'fastest growing city in Africa' after Cairo) I explore how the disjuncture (and friction) between corporate social responsibility and state provision, has given rise to increasing fragmentation and exclusion, rather than the vision of economic empowerment that has come to dominate the discourse of development in post-apartheid South Africa. In Rustenburg, the extended supply chains of the mining industry and the expanding secondary economy appear to offer limitless opportunities to share in the boons of the platinum boom. But, as I argue here, as an elite-sponsored programme of social improvement, the project of CSR brings new economic inequalities while entrenching old social hierarchies around the mines, rendering the compelling promise of 'empowerment through enterprise' highly exclusive and unattainable for most.