This study investigates reception of discourses and practices about sustainable development and CSR in the Southern countries. It is framed by the assumption that those discourses place these countries in a double bind situation. The debates on sustainability are first delineated; then an empirical investigation inquires upon a digital solidarity project between France and Senegal. A quasi-ethnographic (sometimes auto-ethnogreaphic) approach is adopted, following K. Stewart‟s footsteps, in search for clues of double binds, when some practices, phrases or situations show unease inside the reception process. By comparing our observations with the theoretical frame of the gift, we notice that the effects of the studied discourses and practices are opposite to what gift researchers would predict. Computer donations are unilateral, do not build links and relations, on the contrary they tend to hold off both partners. Bateson‟s and Palo Alto School‟s theories bring a systemic perspective on this situation, showing North and South submitted to paradoxical injunctions, driving them towards the need to give always more that threaten to break up the relation. (schismogenesis). We conclude on the need both to let the expression of multiple voices (instead of the CSR monolinguism), and to allow for a critique that could help trigger learning processes. This exploratory research eventually leads less to a radical critique of sustainability and CSR‟s principles, that on the way they are actualized in development aid projects. We call for more voices, more actors, that together may foster a new dialogue for a more responsible CSR, a more solidary digital solidarity, a more sustainable development
[Reception of discourses and practices about sustainable development and CSR in the Southern countries] : [a case of computer donations in Senegal in the context of a tripartite digital solidarity project]