Dialogue or Deception
Published by MAC on 2001-04-23
Dialogue or Deception?
This article is by Andy Rowell and is reprinted with permission. It first appeared in 1999 in DELTA #4, the Newsletter of the Ogoni Support Group in Britain
The last few years have seen a significant change in the philosophy of some leading development and environmental NGO's in the UK. Gone is the air of hostility towards many old adversaries and the emerging consensus is that dialogue with companies and even stakeholder partnerships is the preferred new way for environmentalism. Sworn old enemies now sit round the table and exchange pleasantries. Amongst others, we now have dialogue forums set up between greens on the one hand and biotech, oil mining and nuclear industries on the other.
When trying to understand whether this is a positive trend, we have to realise that it is not a new one. Just as British politics has followed the American lead, British environmentalists are now copying their colleagues from across the Atlantic. In the US, many environmental groups openly solicit support and money from multinationals and now openly want to engage in dialogue with industry. Mark Dowie, an influential American writer, labels this "third wave environmentalism", as he calls it, "the institutionalisation of compromise". He criticises it as undemocratic, as it stinks of back-room deals done by powerful companies and equally powerful environmental organisations, without the consent of the people.
Dowie also warns that the closer environmental or development organisations get to companies the harder it is for them to maintain their independence or their identity as adversaries. He argues that there are already signs that environmentalists are falling prey to the "Stockholm syndrome", a psychological condition in which prisoners of war come to embrace the culture and ideology of their captors.
Due to the increasingly murky divide between the NGO and business community, there has been an increasing debate as to whether this is a wise, who it benefits and why industry is suddenly very keen to jump into bed with their old enemies.
The game of dialogue
There is no doubt that links with environmental groups help industry establish or improve their 'green credentials' and help the company to gloss over its polluting practices. In the USA, the joint project between the Environmental Defense Fund and McDonalds has been repeatedly praised throughout the industry. In this country, we need no reminding that McDonalds sued two unemployed activists who questioned the company's environmental, animal rights, health and employment record.
We must understand that for business, establishing links with environmental, human rights, development and Indigenous groups, and having dialogue with the opposition, is a simple PR technique. Dialogue is the most important PR tactic that companies are using to overcome objections to their operations.
It is a typical divide and rule approach. One PR guru has outlined a three step divide and conquer strategy on how corporations can defeat public interest activists - who apparently fall into four distinct categories: 'radicals', 'opportunists', 'idealists' and 'realists'. The goal is to isolate the radicals, 'cultivate' the idealists and 'educate' them into becoming realists, then co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry.
Dialogue is a very clever PR technique, dreamt up by PR firms whom many activists have never heard of: Burson Marsteller and Hill and Knowlton, for example. So what is the public relations industry? It is a $35 billion a year industry, whose aim, in the words of one Mobil executive "is getting people to behave the way you hope they will behave by persuading them that it is ultimately in their interest to do so".
We should not underestimate the power of corporate PR - indeed, some people argue that corporate propaganda threatens democracy itself. As Australian scholar Alex Carey said:
"The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance; the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
Change of climate
Let's look at some specific examples of corporate PR at work, and what we can learn from them. In 1995, the year Saro-Wiwa was murdered, Shell received a prestigious award from the then British Chancellor, Ken Clarke, for its range of corporate videos, one of which was on climate change. Being the largest global oil company in the world, Shell should be worried about climate change.
It is now an established fact that we are changing the world's climate. The burning of fossil fuels is largely to blame. For the last forty years, Shell and the other fossil fuel companies have adopted a dinosaur mentality towards climate change. Instead of joining the debate constructively, they set out to destroy it. Essentially the oil industry responded with what we call the 3-D PR Strategy:
Deny, delay, dominate:
Deny there is a problem with your product.
Delay effective action.
Dominate the international agenda and the marketplace in the search for alternatives.
The industry has treated climate change as a PR problem - it has funded so-called independent scientists and formed green-sounding front groups, such as the Global Climate Coalition. The GCC, which was set up in the late eighties, was formed to scupper the UN Climate negotiations. In the run up to the Kyoto meeting last December, the GCC spent $60 million dollars trying to persuade the public that they were not to blame and justify a business as usual future - even though that future jeopardises the long-term viability of life on earth.
The use of climate front groups is just one of the many PR techniques companies are using to counter the environmental movement. The techniques are very simple: On the one hand to co-opt the environmental debate and on the other to demonise and marginalise the environmental movement. Co-option can take many forms. Companies have spent billions adopting the language of the environmental movement, or greenwashing their products: motor vehicles, the fastest growing source of pollution on the planet, have become 'environmentally-friendly'. Aerosols are 'ozone friendly', washing powders are phosphate free, even when most had no phosphate in them anyway, aluminium cans and paper bags are not recycled but recyclable. 'Sustainable development' has become one of the most co-opted and corrupted corporate terms used today.
Unsustainable developments
As well as changing their language, companies have changed their tactics - and that is where we come back to dialogue. Let's look at some specific examples. Shell has pioneered a sophisticated 'stakeholder' process, which it hopes will become a blue-print for industry to use elsewhere. Having learnt from its operations in Nigeria and the Brent Spar fiasco, the company is trying a different tract in Peru, where it has been exploring for oil in some of the most culturally and ecologically sensitive rainforest left on the globe, and yet labels it "model sustainable development".
In an unprecedented move, the company held a series of workshops in Lima, Washington and London in December 1997 and June 1998 to which some 90 interested groups or 'stakeholders' in its Peruvian Camisea project were invited. Not up for discussion was whether the project should go ahead, but how it should go ahead. Meanwhile, the whole process divided different groups on whether to take part in the Shell- initiative before Shell decided not to proceed with development on economic grounds.
We can also learn from advice that companies like Shell are receiving from security firms, such as Control Risks, based in London. In a lecture last autumn, John Bray, Head of Research at Control Risks, advised the oil industry how to counter pressure groups, recommending that:
It is no longer acceptable practice purely to operate to national environmental and social laws. Companies must operate and be seen to be operating to best practice world-wide, to a uniform set of international standards. Many local groups are linked to international pressure groups in the US and
Europe. Companies must try to undermine those links by increasing dialogue with stakeholders. The bottom line, say Control Risks, is that if you dialogue with people, then you win. If you meet a group that will not compromise, then you have a problem. One recent classic example of this is the U'wa from Colombia – who refused to back-track against oil development, and even threatened suicide if Occidental and Shell drilled on their land. It was the companies who backed down.
What is interesting about what Control Risks are saying is that by advocating companies operating to global best practice, they are putting forward the same argument that some mainstream environmental and development NGOs are. This is exactly what the companies want - a harmonisation of standards and respectability world-wide, while they carry on their own operations, largely on a business as usual scenario.
The best for you
But we have more to learn. The stakeholder consultation process is the start of a systematic attempt by TNCs to redefine themselves as corporations operating for the common good, not for profit. To give two examples, the most ground-breaking adverts last came from Monsanto, in a £1 million advertising campaign on biotech. Using the names of environmental groups to legitimise the adverts, the company comes across as rational and reasonable and worried what YOU think. Not up for discussion is whether Monsanto will stop genetic modification, but how best to use it. The company is also using labelling as a way of making the technique acceptable. Its PR is very clever, but also "dishonest and untrue", according to the NGO, Genewatch, and "wrong, unproven, misleading and confusing", according to a 1999 ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority in Britain.
Monsanto also launched a Pan-European offensive called "Let the Harvest Begin" whereby they persuaded African leaders to endorse the "dream," to quote Monsanto, "of a tomorrow without hunger. To realise that dream, we must welcome the science that promises hope. Slowing the acceptance of biotechnology is a luxury the hungry world cannot afford."
The implication of the adverts is that if you question biotech now you run the risk of being accused of an imperialist luddite, someone trying to deny starving Africans access to food. In response, delegates from 24 African States to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, backed by 30 development, farming and environmental organisations have objected "strongly that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us."
It seems that Monsanto's PR exercise backfired quite spectacularly: in November last year, leaked public opinion research showed that the Monsanto advertising campaign "was for the most part, overwhelmed by the society-wide collapse of support for genetic engineering in foods". In February
1999, intense media interest in genetic engineering was intertwined with free-falling public confidence in GM foods. Bryan Appleyard, writing in the Sunday Times, said that Monsanto had been "established in many peoples' minds as the most sinister company in the world."
Writing in the Financial Times, Richard Tomkins wrote about Monsanto's "Own goal" arguing that "When the next book on great public relations disasters is written, it is a safe bet that it will be dominated by the story of Monsanto's woes over genetically modified foods in Europe". It is, said
Tomkins "the biggest business fiasco since the Royal Dutch /Shell became the target of public outrage over its plans to sink the Brent Spar oil platform".
Profits and Principles
However, Shell has learnt something from its mistakes over Brent Spar and Nigeria, and is trying to make PR amends. The company's publication Profits and Principles: Does there have to be a Choice? takes corporate PR into a new phase as well. The book is designed to redefine Shell in the public mind-set and is meant to prove that there does not have to be a difference between profit and principle and that Shell is a company with which you can have both. "We care what you think about us", it says in hand-writing on the inside cover, whilst also mentioning dialogue. Shell, by the way, are also spending $30 million changing their image.
You do not have to look far to see the hypocrisy of Shell's position. In Profits and Principles, Shell says about climate change that "prudent precautionary measures are called for" and that "the world needs to take action now". However, last year Shell also spent $7.5 billion on exploration and production of new oil and gas. Hardly a precautionary measure.
We can see Shell's hypocrisy elsewhere. Take the issue of globalisation. Shell says in the same publication that "it strongly supports globalisation for a way to ensure greater prosperity for all". For many people, globalisation represents a race to the bottom for the economy, for the environment and for equity. To them it represents the age of insecurity, while to Shell it represents a business as usual future. Despite the near meltdown of the global economy, most large transnationals argue that further deregulation and liberalisation of the global economy is necessary -indeed Shell supports the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, or MAI, which will further erode the rights of citizens around the world.
Not only is the fossil fuel industry one of the biggest proponents of globalisation, but we have to realise that it is also incompatible with economic stability. There is a myth about oil development in that it actually benefits the host country. In reality, petroleum-led development strategies have delivered nation after nation into a spiral of debt and dependency. For example, a recent Harvard University study looked at 97 developing countries with natural resources and examined their growth from 1971 to 1989. The results of the study showed a negative correlation between a country's reliance on resource extraction and its overall growth. While it should be noted that 'growth' as it is commonly understood rarely benefits the majority of people, the creation of debt certainly has very real negative effects on society and on the potential for genuine sustainable development.
Furthermore, recent ground-breaking research emanating from Ecuador shows that the country is actually worse off now than before its oil was exploited. Its oil reserves have allowed the country to borrow heavily from international money sources, but little of this money has actually benefited the public. Ecuador has a higher national debt than before, a greater number of people who live in poverty, and a greater gap between rich and poor. 80 per cent of oil revenue now goes to service the debt and nothing else. Not only has the country got a higher national debt, but it also has a huge ecological debt, with millions of hectares of rainforest and thousands of Indigenous people adversely affected.
If you calculated the ecological debt that the Northern oil companies owe Southern countries for exploiting their resources, for polluting their lands and their people, the case for oil extraction becomes terminal. From an ecological, cultural and economic perspective, we should be disinvesting now.
Decision time
There are four fundamental questions that threaten to split the environmental movement:
1. Do we take money off companies? If we do, is it only certain companies, and what conditions do we attach? Do we take foundation money? These are difficult questions that people and organisations need to debate.
2. Do we sit down and talk to TNCs? If we do, on whose authority are we sitting down? I realise there are times when dialogue is inevitable, especially if people have been asked to negotiate on behalf of a community threatened by corporate behaviour. I argue that, as a rule, we should not dialogue with TNCs. Instead of sitting with companies, let’s sit together to start putting forward an alternative vision. Once we are united then we can negotiate. Negotiation with a company, especially from a position of strength, is different from company-initiated dialogue.
3. If we are going to work together - Who are we going to work with? If, for example, we are fighting globalisation, do we work with just our traditional allies, or a more broad spectrum of groups?
4. What is our vision for the future? We cannot just highlight the problems, we also have to start working on solutions. Do we accept Shell's and Monsanto's vision of a globalised world dominated by them and by Microsoft and Macdonalds and other unaccountable corporations, who see no limits to growth or limits on manipulation of life? In essence, do we believe that TNCs are part of the solution or problem?
In short, is our future one of compromise or change? I believe the environmental movement stands at a crossroads. As more and more companies want to sit down and negotiate with NGOs, we have to be clear in what we want and what our vision is for the future. Do we envisage these companies being part of a really sustainable future, or do we ask ourselves whether these companies can ever be sustainable?
And if we believe they cannot, then what is the point in wasting precious time, energy and resources talking to them?
More information from lynx@gn.apc.org