“Corporate saviourism” and poverty in the Global South

This chapter deploys the term “corporate saviourism” to describe multi-stakeholder partnerships in which businesses are engaged in the intentional practice of development in the Global South. Through examples from rural Ethiopia and Tanzania, we illustrate how these acts of goodwill aim to install the ideas of entrepreneurship and individualised responsibility into societies and to create human capital for a capitalist social order. While enacting a neoliberal governance rationality, the development interventions depoliticise questions related to inequitable distribution of wealth, entitlement, and rights. For multi-stakeholder partnerships to become truly transformative, however, people and inclusive governments in the Global South must become part of them as the main power holders.