A Critical Review of CSR Transfer and Adaptation in Emerging Markets, 2015–2025

Abstract

The global CSR discourse has been intensified unprecedentedly in the past decade since the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement in 2015. However, there is no scholarly consensus on whether, how, and under which conditions CSR norms developed in Western liberal market economies meaningfully transfer to emerging market contexts. This paper provides a critical systematic review of the literature on CSR transfer and adaptation in emerging markets published from 2015 to 2025, including contributions from Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. We identify four dominant theoretical frameworks that have structured this literature, namely institutional theory, stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory, and political CSR, and critically evaluate their explanatory power and normative adequacy in emerging market contexts. From the literature, three persistent tensions emerge from the review: between universal CSR norms and context-specific moral ecologies; between voluntary, firm-level CSR and state-mandated or institutionally embedded social responsibility; and between the SDG-alignment agenda and the structural inequalities that shape CSR practice in the Global South. We argue that existing frameworks suffer from a common deficiency, an implicit developmental teleology that constructs emerging market CSR as a deficient approximation of a Western ideal, and propose a decolonial corrective that recentres the normative agency of local stakeholder communities. The paper ends with the identification of priority directions for a post-developmental research agenda in global business ethics.