In this introduction to the themed issue, Geographies of Corporate Practice in Development: Contested Capitalism and Encounters, we reflect on how development is shaped by a range of actors in relation to corporate practices and market-based interventions. The research collectively fills a gap in scholarly work critically interrogating the meaning, practices and outcomes of corporate activities that couple growth and profit-led commercial goals with claims to improving lives of vulnerable communities. The geographical perspective adds an understanding of places and narratives of corporate practice, both in the micro-politics of everyday engagements and in associated macro level changes across different scales of engagement. Although the capitalist enterprise itself has long been debated in economic and development geography, its associated social, development and environmental costs and consequences have become the subject of renewed contestation, debate and critique in the last decade, and particularly following the 2008 financial crisis. Here we introduce a set of articles focused on particular development experiences that reflect the grey space between seemingly irreconcilable opposites—sustained commercial growth and profit versus human well-being—recognizing that the corporate interests at stake are multifarious and situated across both corporate and non-corporate domains of influence and actions. For this reason, we speak in this themed issue not merely of corporations and the effects of their development projects, but rather emphasize the encounters between the assemblage of actors involved in implementing, contesting and morphing these projects across scales of intervention, from boardroom ideas to grassroots iterations with social, environmental and economic implications.