This dissertation examines cause-related marketing (CRM) initiatives: where a corporation and a non-governmental organization (NGO) partner to simultaneously promote a product (e.g. bottled water) and a cause (e.g. building wells in Africa). Generally, with CRM, each consumer purchase triggers a donation to that cause. The articles that follow explore how tying international development issues to consumption through CRM influences the ways that distant people and natures are framed and understood, and development practiced.

Specifically this research asks: How do the material and discursive practices used in CRM initiatives constitute development and ethical consumption? To answer this question multiple research methods are used including: interviews and participant observation in the CRM field, a survey of NGOs using CRM, an examination of over 50 CRM initiatives, and a discourse analysis of the marketing materials from two CRM initiatives.

The first dissertation article explores how engaging in the CRM model affects the functioning of development NGOs. It is concluded that under the CRM model, certain types of development issues are funded over others and NGOs are often encouraged to focus on product sales and brand competition at the expense of fundraising and advocacy work. The second and third dissertation articles analyze the discourses surrounding two CRM initiatives. It is concluded that CRM discourses disconnect consumption from its environmental and social consequences through focusing on particular imaginaries of nature and distant others. This in turn leads to North-South connections based on gendered, capitalist and colonial power relations, limiting the potential for more engaged terms of connection.

Together these articles demonstrate the impacts that the CRM model is having on development both materially—in terms of the practices of development NGOs and effects on the environment, and more symbolically—in terms of constituting the connections between the North and the South in particular ways. This has significant implications for how development is practiced and what kinds of alternative visions of development can be imagined.