Sustainability Through Collaboration-Based Corporate Social Responsibility

Sustainable development requires the integration of social, environmental and economic considerations into the developmental processes that impact on the environment in order to achieve equity and balanced judgments for long term sustainability. This paper explores the concept of sustainability of engineering projects from the perspectives of corporate social responsibility within the framework of collaborative planning. Corporate social responsibility which is the commitment of businesses to the sustainable economic development of their host communities and of society at large aims essentially to achieve the goal of environmental sustainability. The principle collaborative planning explores consensus-building and mediation in resolving the construction projects interest group conflicts between the project proponents and other stakeholders, in resolving pre-project, project and post-project environmental and socio-economic concerns. This paper argues that collaborative planning is a medium through which the declared fiduciary social contract (the social corporate responsibility) that exist between construction projects and indeed its business promoters and their host communities can be negotiated to ensure that as they achieves their goal of profit maximisation, the host community also benefits through investments in social capital and good environmental management to achieve sustainable building. The paper starts with explanations of the concept of corporate social responsibility and explores the conceptual imperatives of these for sustainable development through collaborative planning.