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ABSTRACT The role of the private sector in international development is growing, supported by new and evolving official programmes, financing, partnerships and narratives. This article examines the place of the private sector in 'community development' in the global South. It situates corporate community development (CCD) conceptually in long-standing debates within critical development studies to consider the distinct roles that corporations are playing and how they are responding to the challenges and contradictions entailed within 'community development'. Drawing on field-based research across three different contexts and sectors for CCD in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and South Africa, the article suggests that caution is required in assuming that corporations can succeed where governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international development organizations have so often met with complex challenges and intractable difficulties. We argue that four specific problems confront CCD: (a) the problematic ways in which 'communities' are defined, delineated and constructed; (b) the disconnected nature of many CCD initiatives, and lack of alignment and integration with local and national development planning policies and processes; (c) top-down governance, and the absence or erosion of participatory processes and empowerment objectives; (d) the tendency towards highly conservative development visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes are reverberating through the international development system. This article focuses on (re)emerging development actors in the South and their role in setting agendas, challenging current aid orthodoxies, and re-articulating development cooperation relationships between and within the North and South. Specifically, the article examines trilateral development cooperation, a significant new trend in foreign aid. The first aim is to examine the role of trilateral development cooperation in the changing geographies of development and global partnerships. The second aim is to foreground and critically evaluate the politics of trilateral development cooperation. The authors argue that trilateral development cooperation has potential to improve aid effectiveness, harness the energies and expertise of southern partners, and reshape development relations in more egalitarian ways. Alternatively, however, it may work to co-opt (re)emerging donors into a depoliticized and ineffective aid system. While this argument has been made by many critics with regard to North-South development relations, the authors also question the projection of shared interests and essentialized developing country identities in relation to the South-South element of trilateral development cooperation. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to extend critical perspectives to all elements of the new development partnerships emerging within a rapidly changing global landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]