How much faith can we place in corporations to save us from climate change?

The following is extracted from An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual, by Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg and Why corporate promises to cut carbon can’t be trusted by the same authors.

Abstract

“Climate change represents the grandest of challenges facing humanity. In the space of two centuries of industrial development, human civilization has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, with devastating consequences. Business organizations are central to this challenge, in that they support the production of escalating greenhouse gas emissions but also offer innovative ways to decarbonize our economies. In this paper, we examine how businesses respond to climate change. Based on five in-depth case studies of major Australian corporations over a 10-year period (2005–2015), we identify three key stages in the corporate translation of climate change: framing, localizing, and normalizing. We develop a grounded model that explains how the revolutionary import of grand challenges is converted into the mundane and comfortable concerns of “business as usual.” We find that critique is the major driver of this process by continuously revealing the tensions between the demands of the grand challenge and business imperatives. Our paper contributes to the literature on business and the natural environment by identifying how and why corporate environmental initiatives deteriorate over time. More specifically, we highlight the policy limitations of a reliance on business and market responses to the climate crisis.”

Discussion

Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg: “How much faith can we place in corporations to save us from climate change?

In a recently published paper, we explore how major business corporations translate the grand challenge of climate change into strategies, policies and practices over an extended period of time. Our research involved a detailed cross-case analysis of five major corporations operating in Australia over ten years, from 2005 to 2015. During this period, climate change became a central issue in political and economic debate, leading to a range of regulatory, market, and physical risks and opportunities, and each of these five companies were leaders in publicly promoting their engagement with this issue.

However, despite different industry contexts (banking, manufacturing, insurance, media and energy) we found a common pattern over time in which initial statements of climate leadership degenerated into the more mundane concerns of conventional business activity. A key factor in this deterioration of corporate environmental initiatives was on-going criticism from shareholders, the media, governments, and other corporations and managers. This ‘market critique’ continuously revealed the underlying tensions between the demands of radical decarbonisation and more basic business imperatives of profit and shareholder value.

The corporate translation of climate change into business as usual involved three phases. In the first framing phase, senior executives presented climate change as a strategic business issue and set out how their businesses could provide innovation and solutions. Here, managers associated climate change with specific meanings and issues such as “innovation,” “opportunity,” “leadership’” and “win-win outcomes,” while ruling out more negative or threatening understandings (e.g. “doom and gloom,” “regulation,” “sacrifice”).

In a classic expression of this win-win ethos, the global sustainability manager of one of our case organisations (and one of the world’s largest industrial conglomerates) argued: “We’re eliminating the false choice between great economics and the environment. We’re looking for products that will have a positive and powerful impact on the environment and on the economy.”

While these general statements of intent responded to the inherent tension between corporate and environmental interests, convincing stakeholders of the benefits of “greening” initiatives was never assured, and critiques evolved amongst stakeholders and customers who felt their organizations’ environmental efforts either lacked sincerity or failed to satisfy profit motives.

In a second localizing phase, managers sought to make these initial framings directly relevant by implementing practices of improved eco-efficiency, “green” products and services, and promoting the need for climate action. Internal measures of corporate worth were developed to demonstrate the “business case” of climate responses (e.g. savings from reduced energy consumption, measures of increased employee satisfaction and engagement, sales figures from new “green” products and services, and carbon pricing mechanisms).

Companies also sought to communicate the benefits of these initiatives both to employees through corporate culture change initiatives, as well as external stakeholders such as customers, clients, NGOs and political parties.

However, over time these practices attracted renewed criticism from other managers, shareholders, the media, and politicians and in a third normalizing stage, climate change initiatives were wound back and market concerns prioritized. In this stage, the temporary compromise between market and social/environmental discourses was broken and corporate executives sought to realign climate initiatives with the dominant corporate logic of maximizing shareholder value.

Examples here included declining corporate fortunes and new CEOs who promoted a “back to basics” strategy, the shifting political context which unwound climate-focused policy measures like the Clean Energy legislation, new fossil-fuel related business opportunities, and the dilution of climate initiatives within broader and less specific “sustainability” and “resilience” programs.

As one senior manager in a major insurance company : “Look, that was all a nice thing to have in good times but now we’re in hard times. We get back to core stuff.”

Our analysis thus highlights the policy limitations of relying on market and corporate responses to the climate crisis. We need to imagine a future that goes beyond the comfortable assumptions of corporate self-regulation and “market solutions,” and accept the need for mandatory regulation of fossil fuel extraction and use.

In an era in which neoliberalism still dominates political imaginations around the world, our research thus highlights ‘an inconvenient truth’ for political and business elites; the folly of over-dependence on corporations and markets in addressing perhaps the gravest threats to our collective future.”

Photo by arbyreed

The post How Corporate Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Playing for Team Human is Aaron Dignan. Aaron is a strategist, author, and founder of the Ready, where he works on updating the “organizational operating systems” of business. Dignan has advised top executives at global brands including GE, Ford, and American Express.

In today’s episode, Aaron and Douglas speak candidly about what goes on behind the scenes in the halls of corporate power. Can businesses be redesigned into more meaningful and cooperative work structures in the growth driven economy? What might it take to “hack the corporation” into something that serves people over profit? 

You can find Aaron’s blog on Medium or on his website at aarondignan.com. 

Also, check out Aaron’s book, Game Frame: Using Games as a Strategy for Success . In Game Frame, Dignan boasts that “the future of work is play!”

The post Team Human 10: Aaron Dignan on Hacking the Corporation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Imagine a world in which all of the main functions of society are run for-profit by private companies. Schools are run by multinationals. Private security firms have replaced police forces. And most big infrastructure lies in the hands of a tiny plutocratic elite. Justice, such as it is, is meted out by shady corporate tribunals only accessible to the rich, who can easily escape the reach of limited national judicial systems. The poor, on the other hand, have almost no recourse against the mighty will of the remote corporate elite as they are chased off their land and forced into further penury.

This sounds like a piece of dystopian science fiction. But it’s not. It’s very close to the reality in which we live. The power of corporations has reached a level never before seen in human history, often dwarfing the power of states.

Today, of the 100 wealthiest economic entities in the world, 69 are now corporations and only 31 countries*. This is up from 63 to 37 a year ago. At this rate, within a generation we will be living in a world entirely dominated by giant corporations.

As multinationals increasingly dominate areas traditionally considered the primary domain of the state, we should be afraid. While they privatise everything from education and health to border controls and prisons, they stash their profits away in secret offshore accounts. And while they have unrivalled access to decision makers they avoid democratic processes by setting up secret courts enabling them to bypass all judicial systems applicable to people. Meanwhile their raison d’etre of perpetual growth in a finite world is causing environmental destruction and driving climate change. From Sports Direct’s slave-like working conditions to BP’s oil spill devastating people’s homes, stories of corporations violating rights are all too often seen in our daily papers.

Yet the power of corporations is so great within our society that they have undermined the idea that there is any other way to run society. We are all too familiar with hearing about the threat of ‘losing corporate investment’ or companies ‘taking their business somewhere else’ as if the government’s number one task is to attract corporate investment.

It is this corporate agenda that permeates the governing institutions of the global economy, like the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, whose policies and operations have given more importance to the ‘rights’ of big business than the rights and needs of people and the environment.

The problem of unrestrained corporate power is massive, and it requires a massive solution. That is why today Global Justice Now is launching a petition to the UK government demanding that it backs the new UN initiative for a legally binding global treaty on transnational corporations and human rights.

This UN treaty is the result of campaigning by countries from across the global south for international laws to regulate the activities of TNCs. In June 2014 they successfully got a resolution passed in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) establishing the need for such a treaty.

A working group of member states has been set up to take the treaty forward, chaired by Ecuador, they have met once already in 2015, and have the next meeting scheduled for October 2016 to discuss the scope and content of the treaty. Meanwhile, civil society groups from across the world have come together and formed the Treaty Alliance movement which aims to make sure the treaty comes in to being with truly meaningful content.

Although it may sound like a boring technical process, this treaty is something we should be excited about because it provides a huge opportunity in the fight to restrain corporate power. It has massive potential to withdraw the privileges that corporations have gained over recent decades and force them to comply with international human rights law, international labour law and international environmental standards. It would oblige governments to take the power of corporations seriously, and hold them to account for the power they wield. This would standardise how different governments relate to multinationals which means that rather than allowing them to play countries off against one another in a race to the bottom, it would force minimum standards.

But the UK government, well known for its cosy relationship with corporations, has so far refused to take part in this UN treaty. And the UK are not alone, most other EU countries are also opposed to the treaty.

We need to make sure our government doesn’t pass up on this rare opportunity to provide genuine protection for the victims of human rights abuses committed by multinational corporations and place binding obligations on all governments to hold their corporations to account for their impacts on people and the planet.

That’s why groups across the continent are joining forces to make sure their leaders participate in the Geneva talks this October. The petition launched today, urging governments across Europe to participate in the Geneva talks will be delivered to national and EU leaders on October 12th.

Of course, the battle against corporate power has many fronts and the UN treaty is only one part of it. At the same time, we need to continue to develop alternative ways to produce and distribute the goods and services we need. We need to undermine the notion that only massive corporations can make the economy and society ‘work’. Food sovereignty and energy democracy are just two examples of how it is possible to build an economy without corporations. But as long as corporations do play a role in our economy, we need to find ways to control their activity and prevent abuses. This is why we need to fight for this UN treaty.

The alternative is that we continue to rush towards the dystopian vision of unchallenged corporate power. We cannot allow this to happen. We must fight back.

Further resources:

Study: big corporations dominate list of world’s top economic entities – The Guardian

10 Biggest Corporations Make More Money Than Most Countries in the World Combined – press release, Global Justice Now

‘Be Afraid’: Largest Corporations Wealthier Than Most Countries – Common Dreams

The post Corporations running the world used to be science fiction – Now it’s a reality appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But how would I know?

Both Intel and APS have wonderful websites. I’m certain they publish corporate reports.

But what are the environmental impacts of their respective plants? What are their labor practices? How are nearby residents affected by these corporations’ production activity?

Should I rely on local media, themselves owned by corporations, to provide transparency?

Fortunately, a project exists where community members can contribute information about corporations. The composite curated by WikiRate assists citizens and corporations understand local impacts.

Extracted from http://wikirate.org/About_WikiRate

WikiRate spurs corporations to be transparent and responsive by shining a light on their social and environmental impacts.

Corporations affect our world in countless ways. If we want more power to shape those impacts, first we must be able to see them.

Lots of information exists on the social and environmental practices of businesses. What’s missing is context. That’s where WikiRate comes in.

WikiRate is a place for everyone to bring together information on corporate practices, evaluate it, and determine what gaps need to be filled.

As we get answers to the questions that matter to us as a community, an increasingly detailed picture emerges.

We encourage people and organisations to use WikiRate as a platform for advocacy, teaching, and research and analysis.

Extracted from http://wikirate.org/Using_WikiRate

The post Project Of The Day: WikiRate appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We would argue that there are other winners in what Hickel calls “the microfinance game”. Corporate interests of all stripes have a vested interest in seeing millions of people drawn more deeply into the debt-based globalized money economy.

Reposted from Local Futures Helena Norberg-Hodge talks about the false promise of Micro-finance.

Ever since Bill Clinton and the World Bank enthusiastically embraced the microfinance concept in the 1990s, we at Local Futures have been skeptical of its benefits, seeing it as part of a whole package of “market solutions” to our social and environmental crises that, in the long run, make things much worse. We have pointed out that these loans often target rural populations who were not previously in debt: they represent the long arm of capitalism reaching into remote rural areas, encouraging a shift away from dependence on the land and the local community, towards competition in a resource-depleting global economy.

It has not been easy to oppose micro-credit: many well-intentioned grassroots activists have bought into the idea that giving ‘Third World’ women a loan would eradicate poverty and reduce population. This thinking was promoted with missionary zeal, and spread rapidly across the world. In trying to counter it, we have often felt like heretics. (One of the most difficult moments was when I was asked to debate Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, at the height of his popularity, on BBC radio.)

For this reason we’re very happy to see this article by Jason Hickel, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, in the UK Guardian: The microfinance delusion: who really wins? As Hickel says, “microfinance usually makes poverty worse”, because the vast majority of microfinance loans are used to fund the purchase of consumer goods that the borrowers simply can’t afford: “they end up taking out new loans to repay the old ones, wrapping themselves in layers of debt.” Even when used to finance a small business, the most likely outcome is that the new businesses fail, which leads to “vicious cycles of over-indebtedness that drive borrowers even further into poverty.” The only winners are the lenders, many of whom charge exorbitant interest rates. Hickel concludes that “microfinance has become a socially acceptable mechanism for extracting wealth and resources from poor people.”

We would argue that there are other winners in what Hickel calls “the microfinance game”. Corporate interests of all stripes have a vested interest in seeing millions of people drawn more deeply into the debt-based globalized money economy. Interestingly, at the bottom of the webpage where Hickel’s article appears there are links to articles sponsored by the credit card giant Visa, all of them urging more “financial inclusion” in the global South – in other words, bringing more people into the economic system that corporate interests like Visa dominate. “Helping the world’s one billion unbanked women” turns out to be about how “more than 200 million women lack access to a mobile phone, meaning they’re excluded from digital banking opportunities.” Another article argues that one of the greatest challenges facing policymakers involves “providing some 2.5 billion people with access to formal financial services.”

This is propaganda, pure and simple: it is part of a drumbeat coming from think-tanks and corporate-friendly pundits that have been very effective in convincing people – including well-meaning philanthropists and activists – that the solution to global poverty requires pulling ever more people into the global economic system. That system is failing the majority even in the “wealthy” countries, while spurring rampant consumerism and unsustainable resource use worldwide.

The solutions to our many crises – including poverty – will not come from a global marketplace rigged by de-regulatory trade treaties to favor the biggest multinational corporations. They depend on preventing further deregulation of global corporations, while shifting towards more localized economies in which people can have real control over their own lives.

The post Small Loans, Big Problems: The False Promise of Microfinance appeared first on P2P Foundation.