Ten Green Battles
RAFI Justice
Growth of NGOs

Put away the Molotov cocktails and demonstration placards. Put on a suit, arrive at the board meeting on time. The rules, for many Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) at least, are changing. With a near fivefold increase in the number of NGOs worldwide over the last 35 years (see Growth of NGOs), companies are beginning to listen to the voices hailing from the other side of the tracks. The transformation of NGO-business relationships has advanced agendas on both sides. And with it, the role of 'insider-outsider' NGOs happy to ride the fence between hostility and handshakes is surfacing as the most potent form of interaction. Business leaders, take note.

NGOs often spell acronym soup for companies. Non-governmental organization is a grab-bag term for a vast and heterogeneous collection of organizations. From grassroots women's groups to international federations, they represent every special interest under the sun. Today, though, many prefer the moniker 'civil society organizations' (CSOs), drawing attention to who they represent rather than what they are not-and adding yet another acronym to the stew into the bargain.

Over the last ten years, pioneer NGOs have been trying out a variety of tactics to engage business. Different models were tried and tested, some thrown out, others perfected. As a result, the emphasis today is strongly on transactional involvement. Seats at the table are a priority. Dialogue, exchange, roundtables, policy sessions are replacing fundraisers and case-related marketing.

The gamut of NGO-business interactions is wide-and they've advanced immeasurably since early partnerships of the kind brokered with McDonalds by the US group Environmental Defense. At one end of the spectrum, NGOs are demanding time with senior managers to influence policy on product development, ethics and product stewardship. On the other, they are helping define and deliver direct social and environmental services which companies cannot provide themselves. The Shell Petrol Development Company in Nigeria, for example, provides grants to numerous NGOs in the Niger delta to deliver education and health programs.

"Targeting brand names, customers and investors will deliver the most bang for the protest buck."

"There's a growing recognition amongst NGOs that there's much to be gained by being in touch with multinational companies," explains Pat Mooney, executive director of soon-to-be-renamed CSO the Rural Agricultural Foundation International (RAFI). Why-because industry is perceived to have growing influence in development and policy-making at local, national and intergovernmental levels. Jaynati Durai, senior coordinator of Consumers International (UK), agrees: "Companies plan for 10 to 50 years in some instances in a way government doesn't. Many are concerned with infrastructure, education and health and can have a more immediate impact on development and infrastructure than the local public sector can."

The consequence for NGOs is a highly-charged yet subtle dance with corporations behind the scenes. "Much of what we do with companies is quiet dialogue before an issue hits the press. For example, if we feel a product is unsafe, we'll contact a company and put direct pressure on management … In about 50 percent of cases, the company changes policies and no one ever knows about it," explains Durai.

There are still few formal dance steps, however. Most NGOs know if and under which conditions they'll accept donations from corporations, yet rules of engagement for partnership are still being hammered out. "NGOs need to figure out the parameters of interacting and staying neutral," Durai continues.

Whereas some years ago, CSOs engaging in partnerships chose to work with business associations and third party organizations rather than with individual companies, this is changing. As companies start to break ranks with peers and differentiate themselves from the monolith of industry bodies, they become more approachable for activists.

"Just as market campaigning is the new protest paradigm, so can corporate activism be the new business one."

Possibly the highest profile example of this during the 1990s was Greenpeace's deviation from direct action to 'solutions campaigning.' Its Greenfreeze campaign for ozone-friendly refrigeration rewrote the book on dynamic tension, as Greenpeace began to work privately with individual companies, while continuing to attack business publicly. The internal stress to the organization, however, was evident: high profile resignations and a drop in membership subscriptions insinuated a split personality was hard to manage.

But what the Greenfreeze campaign etched most indelibly in the campaigning mindset was the power of the market as a lever for change. Savvy campaigners now understand the market system well enough to seek out the weak links in a value chain or industry sector and they are building dynamic alliances to exploit them. The NGO sector as a whole is becoming bigger and increasingly bolder in taking on individual corporations and entire industries. Pragmatic activists are learning that "market campaigning" is the most efficient means of achieving their ends. And-civil disobedience apart-the most potent NGO tactics of the future will unquestionably revolve around redesigning and creating markets for more sustainable outcomes.

NGOs shifting their primary focus from governments and regulatory regimes to the more dynamic arena of market forces face enormous cultural and ideological challenges, however. They must sever lingering ideological preferences for regulation as the best way to drive change and learn to wield their new market power responsibly.

In the face of these new campaigns, corporations can no longer rely on Old Economy strategies like a combo of advertising, public relations spin-doctoring and behind-closed-doors political lobbying to secure their license to operate-as Monsanto learned only too well when the US food industry value chain was thrown into turmoil from farm to fork in the uproar over genetically modified foods (see Ten Green Battles). Instead, companies need to build their own dynamic alliances with partners from civil society, government and other corporations-transparently.

"Smart market campaigning is a consequence of our opponents figuring out how to bribe politicians into submission," explains John Passacantando, the new executive director of Greenpeace USA. "You have to skip the middleman and find a way to put on pressure that becomes unbearable for these companies. Don't just write to your congressman. Take it straight to the brand." Chastened market targets have included Shell, Coca-Cola and Suncor.

"You have to inflict some pain. Otherwise they're not going to take you seriously."

The colorful career of Mike Roselle, a forests campaigner for Greenpeace, illustrates how the game has changed. Roselle started out in the anti-logging campaigns of the 1970s. He engaged in direct action to protect wilderness areas during a spell with Earth First! Then he converted to the use of litigation to frustrate loggers. Now he's in the thick of the current global consumer-focused protests that have just saved up to 7m acres of rainforest on the Pacific coast in British Columbia, Canada.

The Great Bear Rainforest - home to rich wildlife including the rare Kermode or white "spirit" bear-was being logged by several companies, including Interfor. The company suffered the dubious honor of becoming the main focus of a global protest alliance. Three months of intense Greenpeace-led actions ensued in the US, Canada, Europe, China and Japan, ranging from blockading timber shipments to staging protests at embassies, lumberyards and retail outlets such as do-it-yourself stores. On April 4, a plan to save the forests was announced, endorsed by the government of British Columbia, logging companies, environmental groups and the First Nations.

"You have to inflict some pain," says Roselle-a big, tough, bald-headed man, himself not unlike a lumberjack. "Otherwise they're not going to take you seriously. They were begging us once they were done to stand down. You're putting pressure on every possible place, from executives down to the secretaries."

A key lesson, says Roselle, was that loss of future markets was the biggest fear of corporations. "You cut off their growth," he asserts. "We're developing an entire alternative timber market through the Forest Stewardship Council and these campaigns, moving them to a new future." Critical in the campaign's success was the provision of a viable market alternative-certified wood. "We had to have a way for them to walk out," Roselle reasons. "You can't destroy a company." But when retail giants like Home Depot and IKEA demand timber accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council, a company whose major source of logs continues to be old-growth forests is flirting with the ax.

The allied NGOs of the Americas may have tasted real power with this forests victory, but with it comes responsibility to do more than take companies down: The public can turn on willfully destructive NGOs-however famous their brand names-just as it does on willfully destructive corporations.

This doesn't seem to phase CSOs. At the recent annual conference of the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, Union of Concerned Scientists executive director Howard Ris warned: "Many organizations like ours are going to look outside Washington. We're going to look to companies."

New market-focused campaigns are springing up around the world. In South Africa, humanitarian groups Oxfam International and Medicins Sans Frontières are using market campaigning tactics pioneered by environmental activists to bludgeon the pharmaceutical industry over the price and availability of HIV/AIDS treatments. A group of NGOs is moving to study the global mining industry's value chain, probing for weaknesses and seeking market leverage ahead of a campaign that could mirror the impact of the Forest Stewardship Council on the logging industry. And big US-based global computer firms like Compaq, Intel and IBM are set to face a "take it back" campaign around computer hardware. Orchestrated by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the formative campaign is enlisting, from the outset, socially responsible investment (SRI) houses as well as NGOs, maximizing the opportunities to pile on pressure in the marketplace.

Drivers for the big protest campaigns of the future will undoubtedly be social inequality and environmental crises, with core issues including wealth distribution, clean water, safe food, personal security, health, energy and mobility. Sophisticated and well-networked protest infrastructure will extend from direct action at the factory gates to the heart of the market-based democratic system-the financial markets.

Litigation, letter-writing campaigns to politicians and an array of other tactics will continue to be used in today's comprehensive, cover-all-bases campaigns, but targeting brand names, customers, investors and other flexpoints of corporate vulnerability will deliver the most bang for the protest buck. The lessons of the great anti-corporate campaigns of the past decade are shaping those of the new.

The next major campaign, no doubt, will be a push on climate change propelled by the March decision of the new US administration to dump the Kyoto Protocol. In the days after the Bush announcement, there was plenty of anger directed at politicians, but the tactical talk in high-level green circles was mainly about the targeting of corporations. The same buzz was rampant among NGOs, their Global Greens political allies who were meeting in Australia in April and the fast-growing SRI industry. Their aim: to hit corporations, inflict pain and get them to put pressure on politicians. The critical question is who gets targeted.

On April 5, Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International wrote to the leading 100 US companies on the new Fortune 500 list, currently topped by Exxon Mobil. The message was clear: Within a week, publicly support Kyoto as a "minimal, but essential first step" on climate change action, or face our wrath and that of the whole global environmental movement.

"The American people can register their opinions at the ballot box," explains Greenpeace International executive director, Gerd Leipold. "But for the rest of the world … all we can do is register our opinions via the marketplace." It will be a year and half before Americans get to vote again in mid-term congressional elections, but if protesters can move the consumers of Earth's biggest, most powerful and worst-polluting economy before then, its voters may be left dead in the water.

Next year, NGOs and perhaps progressive corporations will be the key players challenging governments at the Rio+10 Earth Summit to be held in Johannesburg. NGOs are certain to claim the moral high ground at this international gathering, but where will corporations stand, both individually and collectively?

Just as market campaigning is the new protest paradigm, so can corporate activism be the new business one. Corporations must forge new relationships in a marketplace that now includes NGOs-or CSOs-as active and well-networked players. They must provide solutions instead of creating problems. Corporations have the ability and the opportunity to deliver far more on sustainability than governments have, or ever will. Either way, the market will decide.

Over the decade, ten corporate targets learned some hard lessons about doing battle with NGOs in the court of public opinion. The NGOs learned a thing or two as well-and they're putting that knowledge to work designing the next generation of campaigns.

SHELL: In 1995 the oil giant was hit by a double whammy of attacks over plans to sink the old Brent Spar oil rig in the North Sea and over its alleged complicity in the execution of Ogoniland indigenous leaders by Nigeria's military regime. Shell suffered painful sales losses in Germany, and a barrage of criticism forced a far-reaching company transition towards sustainability.

MONSANTO: In the second half of the 1990s Monsanto dramatically failed to walk the talk on sustainability as it launched genetically modified crops onto the market and it was met with a global campaign that coined the powerful term "Frankenfood." Ongoing fallout has included the breakup of the company, serious damage to the whole life-sciences sector, threats to the US-style industrialized food system and the rapid growth of a vibrant organic farming industry.

NIKE: Even after ten years of campaigning against Nike over alleged abuse of workers in 'sweatshops' of its developing world subcontractors, NikeWatch and its cohorts are still going strong. This reinforces how much harder it is to restore a reputation than to lose it. Nike is still demonized by many despite impressive sustainability initiatives, including workplace monitoring.

PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY: The HIV/AIDS drug campaign, which has risen to prominence over the past year, shows how 'best practice' protest tactics have spread among different types of NGOs. It also shows that community outrage can be generated on behalf of people as well as whales. Dozens of pharmaceutical companies now face the kind of pressure once felt primarily by the likes of miners, loggers and furriers.

McDONALD'S: The long-running "McLibel" defamation case pitting the world's biggest fast-food company, US-based McDonald's, against two activists from Greenpeace London (not related to Greenpeace International) demonstrated the folly of applying corporate might against tiny, persistent opponents. Perhaps the biggest lesson was the public relations power held by the underdog.

WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION: The Seattle riots in 1999 showed how decentralized, powerful protest coalitions could be formed and coordinated in the era of email and cell phones. The anti-globalization fallout has continued in protests around the world against other players such as the World Economic Forum and the World Bank. Seattle-style coalition-building is now occurring in many arenas.

TOBACCO INDUSTRY: The anti-tobacco-industry campaign came of age in the 1990s, with governments and lawyers taking up the mantle from consumer health activists, legislating and litigating the tobacco companies and smokers themselves into new behavior. This followed the pattern of Old-Economy social movements: progression over decades from radical fringe protest to broad community engagement to 'establishment' campaign. In the New Economy, this process tends to be far faster and more chaotic (witness Monsanto).

FOREST INDUSTRY: A decades-long effort to save old-growth forests was revolutionized in the 1990s by market campaigning tactics, culminating in the humbling of Interfor in Canada by a Greenpeace-led global coalition. Creation of the Forest Stewardship Council to foster a market for timber from sustainably managed forests was critical to this campaign, underscoring the potential for market creation or redefinition.

SUNCOR: Greenpeace scored an early victory against Suncor in a climate change campaign that still has a long way to run. The Canadian-based oil and gas company was forced to walk away from a potentially massive oil-from-shale industry in Australia in April 2001, apparently because of greenhouse gas emission concerns and costs. It's being touted by Greenpeace as the first fossil fuel development in the world to be "killed by climate change."

COCA-COLA: Coca-Cola buckled within weeks after its precious brand and Olympic sponsorship were embroiled in a campaign against the company's use of greenhouse-polluting HFCs in refrigeration units. A Canadian-based group called Adbusters launched "culture jamming" attacks on the company's logos and slogans, demonstrating novel and creative approaches that can be a key feature of successful market campaigning.

Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) is a fitting icon for the new breed of NGO characterized in part by positive, constructive engagement with corporations and in part by direct action against them. Call it organizational schizophrenia. Call it "solutions campaigning." Whatever you call it, the effects can be potent.

RAFI, a small, soon-to-be-renamed CSO based in Winnipeg, Canada, has seven staff members on three continents working to promote sustainable agriculture, preserve rural ways of life and protect biodiversity and intellectual property rights. It's a low-cost, well-wired operation with high-class knowledge management-and chutzpah by the shovel-full. The group's efficiency and ability to propagate ideas should make marketing companies drool with envy.

Witness the public relations ruckus RAFI caused by coining the "terminator" label to describe biotech developments that leave second-generation seeds sterile. While work on the technology hasn't stopped, several biotech companies reacted to the fervor by publicly stating they would not engage in related research.

Battling against "unfair" intellectual property rights on plant varieties is a mainstay in RAFI's workload. Recently the group forced a private research institute in Australia to drop two patents on cowpeas because RAFI discovered that the germ plasma originated from a public trust gene bank. This discovery led to the reversal of the patents and the investigation of a subsequent 147 similar patents. According to RAFI executive director Pat Mooney: "The value of the action was in education and awareness-building about [intellectual property rights]. Industry was shocked by the revelations. They were embarrassed, but didn't disagree that the patents were bad."

One of RAFI's finest tools is a sharp tongue and the willingness to use it. Most business people get disgruntled with the emotional rhetoric and apparent hyperbole coming from some NGOs. But Mooney is anything but apologetic for his group's show-stealing antics. "We're obnoxious and that's part of our strategy. It gets us attention," he explains.

A saving grace is RAFI's masterful use of wit and humor in making its points-whether posting cartoons on the Web, holding "name-calling" contests or coining new terms in its ongoing war of words. In addition to "terminator," the group takes credit for coming up with "bioserfdom," "traitor tech" and "gene giants."

Yet RAFI works with members of the business community as often as it aims campaigns against them. "We need to talk things through around lots of tables," explains Mooney. "It's not that one party 'wins.' We don't want bad things to happen to poor people and the companies don't want bad things to happen to their reputation or profit. We say: 'We may hate you guys, but we agree on this statement.' Our willingness to work with companies shakes up governments and can help move the debate along."

RAFI's grasp and command of complex issues is key to its effectiveness. "I don't always agree with them, but am more sympathetic to their view because they're an intelligent development NGO, not crazy environmentalists," says Tim Roberts, a charter patent attorney who has represented chemical giant ICI at many intergovernmental negotiations. "Much of what they say doesn't help, but the intentions are good and I agree with the ends, not the means."

Such respect has opened impressive doors. RAFI's official presence at the FAO's intergovernmental negotiations for the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources marks the first time an NGO has been invited into a closed-session negotiation process and it speaks volumes for RAFI's professionalism.

RAFI's in-depth knowledge and 22 years of experience allow it to play the 'insider-outsider' role. This is a key characteristic of the new breed of NGOs. They know the players-the scientists, politicians, business leaders-and can glide amongst them comfortably. Yet they also stand apart and are free to either strike against or work in tandem with companies.

As an 'insider-outsider, RAFI is either the grit in the oyster or the wolf howling outside the door. It depends on your perspective. And sometimes the hour of the day.

	1966	1986	2000
Africa	4239	20,738	21,129
Americas	7471	15,956	27,096
Asia	5194	13,625	26,040
Pacific	1083	3013	5866
Europe	18,212	34,503	73,981
Total	36,199	79,586	154,112

Source: Yearbook of International Organizations, Union of International Associations.