University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

INVESTIGATING THE PRINCIPLES OF CORPORATE
GOVERNANCE AND THEIR LINKAGES TO BROADER
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: CASES OF FINLAND
AND ZAMBIA - (PhD Research Project)
Abstract
Amos Mulenga Mumba
University of Vaasa, Finland.
488
The African continent is undoubtedly blessed with numerous rich resources; at the same time it
remains the poorest on the planet in all forms of the word. The “paradox of the plenty”, (a
situation where a country may rank low in terms of wealth despite being rich in terms of
resources) is more evident in Africa than anywhere else. In an effort to solve that pradox,
Countries such as Zambia have joined the race to attain the United Nations's Millenium
Developmet Goals by the year 2015. Five years before that deadline however, the future of such
countries looks as bleak as it looked at the time these MDGs where drawn and adopted. Zambian
policy makers often use words such as sustainable development as an end they wish to achieve
through MDGs, but amid the generally held view that these goals have been successful in
drawing the country's attention to its numerous problems, questions still remain as to which
strategies should be adopted and how they should be implemented to especially achieve poverty
alleviation, tackle climate change and facilitate the development of a more prosperous society.
Public sector driven economic activity is said to be the best way to achieve efficient and
sustainable productivity that creates jobs and eventually social economic development. In that
line, the Public - Private Partnerships (PPPs) is one of the strategic policies the Zambian
Government lauched in 2006 in an efort to encourage pivate and public sector collaboration
towards developing a sustainable economy. However, this has yielded little or no tangible
success mainly because the Zambian economy is mared by a fragmented political environment,
endemic corruption, lack of transparency in both private and public resource management; vices
that often times render development efforts useless. In the efforts to find the best strategic
approaches to attaining meaningful sustainable development, many questions need to be asked by
various economic actors, one such question is: Can Corporate Governance offer some viable
alternative policy and strategic approaches to economic development by enshrining its four
pillars; Accountability, Transpaprency, Fairness and Reponsibility at the core of the interactions
between all economic actors?
Keywords: Corporate Governance, Sustainable Development, Corporate Social Responsibility,
Zambia
Introduction / Aim of the study
The aim of this study is to investigate corporate governance (CG), and its linkages to
sustainable development (SD). The study will review existing literature on the
corporate governance concept in relation to the concept of sustainable development,
building from agency and institutional theories.