March 31, 2010
Good Cop/Bad Cop: Environmental NGOs and their Strategies Toward Business
Campaign & Advocacy
Good Cop/Bad Cop, edited by Thomas P. Lyon and published by Resources for the Future (RFF), a Washington D.C.-based environmental think tank, is a compilation of essays assessing the interaction of environmental NGOs with the corporate world. What strategies do environmental NGOs utilize to get their message across? The book includes contributions from three different sectors of society: academia, NGOs and businesspeople. In the academic arena, there are contributions from political scientists, sociologists and economists. Each chapter focuses on a different insight on how the NGOs operate. Representatives from NGOs recount their own experiences with engagement with business. Additionally, the book maps areas that are yet to be developed in the environmental NGOs field, such as the interaction between private politics, represented by NGOs and advocacy groups, and elected officials.
The title of the book derives from the typology developed in the first chapter of the book by John Elkington, co-founder of SustainAbility, and Seb Beloe, head of Sustainable and Responsible Investment Research at Henderson Global Investors. They devised a four category, two by two matrix to classify types of environmental NGOs: polarizers to integrators and discriminators to non-discriminators. The so-called “bad cops”––polarizing NGOs––tend to be more critical and less collaborative in engaging corporations, lawmakers or other entities. “Good cops”––integrating NGOs––aim at promoting their goals through constructive partnerships with government and civil society organizations. Discriminators employ unique tactics for different organizations, studying their targets carefully before embarking on campaigns. Non-discriminatory NGOs do not take their targets into consideration and use consistent tactics. The authors use aquatic mammals to illustrate their matrix.
Polarizers and discriminators NGOs are called orcas; polarizers and non-discriminators are designated as sharks. Integrators and discriminators are named dolphins; integrators and non-discriminators are called sealions. There are important differences that emerge from the qualifications of each of the types. Sealions are deemed to be very conscious of their funding sources and very unlikely to act contrary to the interests of their funders, be they companies, foundations or their own members. In contrast, sharks attack indiscriminately and tend to seek weaker targets. Orcas carefully select their targets but can be unpredictable and confrontational. For example, Greenpeace is more likely to engage in protests and actions aimed at shaming companies or politicians that do not act in accordance with its standards. One current example is its campaign to hold public officials accountable on energy issues. It established a campaigning website, PolluterWatch and a companion satirical site, Polluter Harmony , which pretends to be a dating service that matches Congresspeople with corporate lobbyists in an attempt to embarrass and bully Congress. Dolphins, such as the World Wildlife Fund, are adaptive, willing to negotiate with businesses to encourage them to change their environmental stands. The partnership of WWF with Coca-Cola Company in setting sustainability targets is a good example of the approach.
At a book launch and seminar promoting the release of the book, professor Lyon, the director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, noted that the book emerged from a conference in 2007 at Michigan that brought together members of the environmental community to advance an understanding of how NGOs operate. There are numerous theories that deal with the behavior of economic agents, he explained, but they do not explain NGOs because they are deemed to be outside the logic of profitability and traditional politics. Therefore, an assessment of what NGOs want and how they operate has become even more important. There is also a recognition that environmental NGOs have moved from the fringes of power to the inside and are able to exert more influence now than ever before. The organizations are part of a phenomenon known as private politics, in which private citizens and institutions aim at changes in legislative practices and culture without being part of the electoral process. In this fashion, the question becomes how this direct engagement affects the behavior of corporations.
At the seminar, representatives of the WWF and Greenpeace provided examples of how they had changed corporate behavior to advance their ideas. Greenpeace Research Director, Kert Davies, referred to NGOs as a “police force,” borrowing on the book’s metaphor of good and bad cops. The Director of EH&S National Stewardship Strategy at Duke Energy, Heather Quinley, discussed how corporations worked at times with NGOs, such as through the US Climate Action Partnership.
One key focus of the book is on the organizational structure of NGOs and their relative lack of transparency. In the book, Lawrence Rothenberg, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester, discussed democracy and democratic procedures inside the environmental NGOs. He points out that most current environmental NGOs are run as oligarchies in terms of management and selection process of its decision-makers. It is commonplace for board members to select future board members and for the oligarchic management to perpetuate itself. The leadership often considers itself to be better adept at maintaining the organization’s founding mission, but it is neither democratic nor transparent, commitments that NGOs regularly demand from corporations. Additionally, in contrast to more democratically structured political parties, members tend to vent their dissatisfaction with the conduct of an NGO by leaving it and forming a new one. Rothenberg is not entirely critical of this somewhat autocratic structure. He notes that many members of an NGO can be seen as not having enough background information to evaluate candidates to run the organization and a commitment to educating all of them would be costly and not necessarily in the best interest of the NGO. He suggests that in this regard, a democratic structure for an NGO could be destabilizing, forcing it to adopt a position that it does not consider appropriate or in synchrony with its overall goals.
Who then are NGOs accountable to? The issue of accountability is thorny for NGOs. Elkington and Beloe argue that environmental NGOs answer to three sometimes competing stakeholders: clients; staff and associates; and donors and supporters. The expectation that an environmental NGO should provide a vaguely described “public good” often results in their clients being loosely defined as sectors of society or the society as a whole. Unless, an NGO has a very specific and defined mandate with a target population, such as saving tribal livelihoods in the Amazon forest, its client base will be so broad that it’s almost impossible to judge whether it is being responsive to its intended clients. In effect, there are often no specific clients to hold an NGO accountable. In contrast, donors and supporters are in a better position to demand accountability.
Frederico Ferreira is a Spring researcher at the American Enterprise Institute
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