Why corporate leaders should welcome NGO campaigns to supercharge climate action.
George Harding-Rolls, Campaign Lead
2024.11.11
Understand the bigger picture
Battening down the hatches and trying to ride out the campaigners is rarely a successful strategy. It can lead to an escalation of tactics, damaged reputation, dampened employee morale, and even dipping market value. For example, when Shell announced plans to drill for oil in the arctic, Greenpeace naturally protested — but received little engagement from the company. They escalated their campaign over the next five years and Shell ultimately abandoned drilling in the Arctic, having wasted billions in the process, citing — among other causes — the significant public outcry.
For any company considering the no-engagement approach, (we’re looking at you, Canon) it’s important to ask yourself what you’re really trying to gain long term from that strategy. This year again was the hottest on record. Major (profit-reaping) corporations continue to be some of the world’s largest polluters. Planetary systems are on the brink. The solutions (like scaling up renewable energy) should be right at the forefront of every corporate strategy if companies want to continue operating in a stable environment in the future. Can you really afford not to engage, given what’s at stake?
This kind of bigger picture understanding is crucial to constructive engagement. On multiple occasions, initial negotiations with corporates that are on the receiving end of campaigning or judicious investigations by civil society organizations (CSOs) will feature a patient explanation of how campaigners fit into a wider process of change, and reframing campaigns to disgruntled executives as the push they didn’t know they needed.
A blessing in disguise
Picture yourself as an ambitious sustainability executive at a top fashion company (or maybe you are already one — in which case, welcome). Chances are you’re all too familiar with the yawning gap between the action your company is prepared to take, and the measures needed to prevent our planet’s vital systems breaking down. Maybe you’ve tried the bigger picture approach with your board, trying a left-right of doom and hopeism to nudge climate up the priorities list. But you’re pushed back against time and again — the time scales are too distant, the responsibility too vague and the risk is threatening but ultimately nebulous.
Now an NGO comes knocking, calling you out for your lack of renewable energy procurement and concrete climate targets. Your customers are taking notice, the heat is turning up on social media and in the press. The NGO’s campaign has effectively turned that nebulous threat and made it a reputational and business risk for your company. A pain in the neck, or a golden opportunity to present to the company’s decision makers that a lack of ambition will have material consequences?
Like it or not, the evidence is there all around us in our changing climate and depleted biodiversity: 30 years of self-regulation and corporate sustainability have failed to shift things on the scale needed, and much of this is due to the self-interest baked into shareholder capitalism. But what can make shareholder capitalism sit up and think is wider reputation crises and shifts in customer attitudes. Corporate accountability campaigns are a crucial piece of the puzzle in confronting companies with uncomfortable truths and asking for action (see below). Embrace the discomfort and seize the opportunity to engage.
How to engage?
From the why to the how. There are as many ways to engage with NGOs on their campaigns as there are campaigns, so it really depends on the specific asks and tactics in question. Several common themes are broadly applicable, however:
Engaging with NGOs can grease the wheels of sustainability action
Many savvy sustainability executives recognise that campaigns can be a blessing in disguise for unblocking internal barriers. Early in my career I heard a story about a frustrated sustainability director at a palm oil producer who was blocked at every turn in his ambitions to reduce the company’s harmful practices. He created a relationship with a large green NGO working on palm oil, dropping subtle non NDA breaking hints as to where would be the best places to investigate, knowing that this kind of external pressure could be galvanized internally to increase corporate action. You may not be comfortable with this type of informal engagement, but viewing campaigners as allies can transform your engagement.
Both inside track and outside track
Campaigners will frequently use the terms inside track and outside track, referring to engagement that takes place behind closed doors and often seeks to understand systems of influence within the corporate structure and lobby internally, and campaigning that is more vocal, public and confrontation — from activism to advocacy. Most successful campaigns will have a combination of both, and from the perspective of a company engaging with both is equally important.
Helping an NGO to understand the internal barriers to action, and how they might align their asks to target the right part of the business, or even the right individual, can save time, reputational risk, and help with internal sustainability ambitions. Likewise with responding and engaging with outside track campaigning: for example responding to media, working to align public commitments and targets, increasing transparency and disclosure, and acknowledging the need for progress. Done well, it can turn reputational fall-out into reputational gain.
It’s not just NGOs that campaign
Lastly, companies should also take a look at their own campaigning efforts, particularly in the field of lobbying and advocacy. We all operate within certain regulatory confines, making climate action more or less attractive depending on the context and country. In most countries the policy landscape makes it difficult for companies to go above and beyond what is legally required, but companies can use their clout to shift the window on what those minimum requirements are, leveling the playing field.
Unfortunately there are many more examples of companies lobbying and influencing out of sheer self-interest, such as big tech’s attempts to rewrite the rules on net zero to their advantage. But an example of what good looks like would be the slew of companies recognising that the rules governing the fashion system need fixing, and therefore publicly endorsing the New York Fashion Act. These endorsements can make all the difference in getting such legislation across the line.
Seeing the value in being targeted
NGOs are important stakeholders for companies and should be also viewed as bellwethers for society’s expectation of companies. The economist Joseph Schumpter’s theory of creative destruction is an important framing for engagement with NGO campaigns. Creative destruction implies that innovations and new ways of thinking inherently disrupt existing markets and products, giving way to developments that better fit society’s evolving expectations. NGOs and the campaigns they spearhead are often good indicators of wider societal demands for change, and interpreters of risk to be heeded.
Beyond campaigners’ roles as social gadflies, the wider NGO community plays a vital and often unsung role in data, analysis and assessment of processes on climate and other sustainability challenges. Recognise this wealth of experience and knowledge and how it contributes to the broader understanding of environmental impacts, shaping policy, and driving corporate accountability. By valuing this expertise, companies can leverage NGOs’ insights to improve their own strategies, recognising NGOs as partners in progress — not just critics — enabling a more constructive approach to tackling complex climate and sustainability challenges together.
Bonus: Panarchy at the beaver dam
Without getting too deep into systems theory, a model I find useful for understanding the dynamics between NGOs, activists, and corporations is the panarchy model (see below). It’s a way to visualize how complex systems — whether natural ecosystems like forests or human constructs like political institutions or corporations — move through cycles of growth, conservation, release, and reorganization. Each stage has its role: some players focus on nurturing the emerging system, others bring creative disruption, while some stand back and observe the whole process.
Campaigners and corporate accountability movements often position themselves in the “release and reorganization” phases. They identify where change is most needed, shining a light on companies whose shifts can trigger a knock-on effect across industries. Meanwhile, corporations usually concentrate on adapting, reorganizing, and, let’s be honest, exploiting new opportunities when they arise. In this cyclical dynamic, NGOs function as a vital market check, stepping in when the system struggles to self-regulate and often pushing for stronger regulation as a result.
Imagine campaigners as beavers in a monoculture forest. Just as beavers reshape a landscape through selective targeting of trees, NGOs and activists’ disruption of the corporate ecosystem ultimately seeks to enhance the resilience of the entire system. Their efforts may seem disordering, but they ultimately enrich the broader landscape, helping to create a system that’s more adaptable, resilient, and sustainable.
So while campaigners and NGOs might at times seem overly critical and spikey – particularly to sustainability teams who are already (hopefully) trying hard to disrupt and activate from within – recognising how these two groups interplay for greater change is central to understanding the importance of engagement. When discussions are entrenched and adversarial, it can help parties on both sides to not only identify their role in the process of change and how it requires and necessitates the roles around it in order to shift the system onto a new, sustainable path. That goes just as much for corporate executives as for campaigners themselves.
