Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as Window dressing

Wanting to help in the search for alternatives, a number of years ago I sold Business Ethics and moved to the Tellus Institute in Boston. There, my colleague Allen White and I cofounded the initiative Corporation 20/20, bringing together hundreds of leaders from business, finance, law, government, labor, and civil society to explore alternatives to the dominant corporate form. That work confirmed my growing conviction that ownership is the root issue. I remember a particular moment when it snapped into focus for the whole group.

someone uttered a simple statement. I wish I could remember who said it. But I’ll never forget what he said: “Ownership is the original system condition.”

The energy in the group was back because we’d touched the root issue that defines corporations and capital markets today. It’s ownership. Ownership is the gravitational field that holds our economy in its orbit, locking us all into behaviors that lead to financial excess and ecological overshoot.

In Quebec and Latin America, among other places, there’s a growing movement for the solidarity economy—consisting of cooperatives and nonprofits—which in Quebec has gained formal recognition and government funding as a distinct sector of the economy.

Emerging ownership models are new members of an older family of designs that include cooperatives, employee-owned firms, and government- sponsored enterprises. In the UK, these include the John Lewis Partnership—the largest department store chain in the country—which is 100 percent owned by its employees and has an employee house of representatives in addition to a traditional board of directors.

For what’s at work isn’t economic innovation as it’s usually meant, which is about better and better ways to make more and more money. This innovation is almost unimaginably more profound. It is a reinvention at the level of organizational purpose and structure. It is about creating economic architectures that are self-organized around serving the needs of life.

began looking at forms of ownership that didn’t involve corporations at all.  I studied shared ownership and governance of homes, farms, forests, wind farms, fishing rights, and more.

This was the subject of the meeting into which Martin Choco entered and produced a letter, telling the villagers to sign it and get their jobs back. The letter gave US Capital Energy unlimited access to operate seismic lines on Conejo's territory, condemned the leadership for exceeding their authority in sending their original letter of objection, and made no mention of company compensation for the cutting of the illegal lines. Acting on legal advice, the leadership suspended the meeting while Choco continued to collect signatures. Choco's superior is US Capital Energy's representative in Belize, Alistair King, and two days later he said that the letter was written by the villagers themselves and “nothing to do” with the company. Although it lacked the signatures of a majority of Conejo's adult population, he maintained that it granted his company sufficient authority to return to operate the lines that week.

While Alistair King was announcing the return of the company to Conejo's land, and praising the value of having someone like Choco with the company, “who speaks the language”, Conejo's current chairperson Enriqué Makin was walking between the thatched houses scattered through the rainforest. He held a letter, which read: “We did not give US Capital Energy our free, prior and informed consent to conduct seismic testing on our traditional lands affirmed by the Supreme Court of Justice of Belize on [sic] October 2007.” It was signed by the majority of Conejo’s adult population, prompting a showdown meeting between Belize's Department of Geology and Petroleum, the village elders of Conejo, the chairperson and Alcalde, and Martin Choco. The company was ordered to cease operating on Conejo's land and to remove the tags placed along the seismic lines marking the drilling holes for the burial of explosives.

The value of free, prior and informed consent lies in its ability to ensure that the options facing indigenous communities are decided collectively, allowing a degree of meaningful deliberation in lieu of the official, political self-determination that they are generally lacking.

The phenomenon of the commodification of life is also affecting land.

In Mali, a public-private partnership system and a framework of long-term leases have been used to lease several tens of thousands of hectares of land at very low cost to foreign governments or private investors (both foreign and nationals).

This new plague of land grabbing, over and above being characterised by huge areas, is just the tip of the iceberg of commercial farming, one that uses vast quantities of water. Agronomically speaking, it has been proven that the quantity of water required to grow 1 kg of rice could grow 3 kg of sorghum. When this land is being used to grow agro-fuel, it will work even more against food security. For those communities that are affected, land grabbing also involves water grabbing. This is a factor in many conflicts.