Featured Download
Speak Like a CEO
This chapter describes ten helpful actions and behaviors that will bring you...
Content provided in partnership with
Bluewash: Kenny Bruno follows the course that has taken corporations from environmental 'greenwash' to polishing up their humanitarian image
New Internationalist, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Kenny Bruno
As a child growing up in New York City, on Hallowe'en I used to go around with a little orange box to collect pennies for UNICEF. I have no idea how much those pennies helped children around the world but, if nothing else, it was a brilliant branding scheme. The sing-song 'trick or treat for UNICEF' still rings in my ears every Hallowe'en. At an impressionable age, my mother told me I was a 'partner' with the United Nations.
Partnership is still in vogue at the UN, but it has a different connotation. The preferred partner today is an oil giant like Shell, a mining conglomerate like Rio Tinto or a global food merchant like Nestle. The idea is that the UN, starved of funding by its Member States, cannot solve problems on its own. Therefore it must turn to those with the power to do so. And where does one find the largest concentration of power, capital and technology? Transnational corporations (TNCs), of course.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
The flaw in this logic is that in confronting myriad crises the UN seeks to enlist the very entities that are at the root of creating many of them. The experts in the technologies and systems that have caused the problems are assumed to be the experts at finding solutions.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Granddaddy of the corporate partnership programmes is the Global Compact. It was first proposed by Kofi Annan to the elite World Economic Forum in Davos almost a year before the global justice movement burst on the scene in Seattle. The first taker from the business world was the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)--the world's largest corporate lobby group. Its embrace should have raised deep suspicion.
Even before the 1992 Rio Earth Summit the ICC was an effective voice in derailing international regulations and promoting false, superficial solutions. In 1991, in the lead-up to the Rio Summit, it published a book called From Ideas to Action in which it expressed delight that many corporations had agreed to sign up to the Rotterdam Charter for Sustainable Development, a series of voluntary principles developed by the ICC. Most of the book was devoted to 'case studies', which were in fact carefully selected anecdotes about purportedly sustainable projects.
Fast forward to 1999. The Global Compact asks companies to sign up to nine principles and submit case studies. Stripped of its bells and whistles, it has the same foundation as the ICC developed for its own members. The principles sound good, but adherence to them is neither monitored nor enforced. The case studies do not represent the overall record of the company, and allow only good news.
More fundamentally, the philosophy of the ICC--that open markets are the key to sustainable development--was not to be challenged, and became the philosophy of the UN.
The qualified support shown initially by some groups, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam, has frayed badly and they have begun to distance themselves from the Compact. Groups that openly criticize the Compact have often been dismissed by UN staff as negative, confrontational and unproductive.
Tight embrace
Ironically, these 'negative' groups are among the staunchest supporters of the UN. But by 2002 the UN's policies toward business were so supine that a major protest targeted the corporate influence over the UN Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.
What caused it to embrace the corporate world so tightly? In the late 1980s, at the height of a wave of environmental awareness, some companies began to present themselves as lovers of the environment. DuPont--which was responsible for a large part of the ozone hole--featured breaching whales in its ads. Chevron, one of the largest oil companies, touted its support for wildlife reserves. Magazines were filled with expensively photographed migrating birds, pristine rivers and adorable marine mammals, accompanied by words communicating pious concern for the environment--all brought to you by the biggest polluters on the planet.
'Greenwash' reached a kind of global apotheosis at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The world's most damaging companies signed up to the cause of sustainable development--as long as it didn't actually force any serious changes to their behaviour. Since then their consistent message has been that they understand the issues and will provide solutions--as long as they are left alone to do so.
The world's governments endorsed the voluntary approach. When the US insisted on UN reform in the 1990s, one of the casualties was the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations, which provided information and technical assistance to developing countries in their dealings with corporations. Over the next few years the specialized agencies working on issues closely related to corporate impacts were given insufficient funds. By the late 1990s an impoverished UN Development Programme began to see itself as a 'broker' between countries and private sector partners. The Commission on Sustainable Development became a talk-shop.
