Andy Rowell addressing an Oxfam-conference in 1998
Over 2,000 Ogoni, including their leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa have died since
they started their
non-violent campaign against Shell. Many Ogoni are still imprisoned
today. Their only crime was
to campaign against the ecological destruction of their homeland by
Shell and ask for a greater
share of the oil wealth that had been drilled from under their land.
What have the Ogoni got to do with corporate PR, you might ask?
Right from the start of the Nigerian conflict, Shell was more interested
in preserving its image
than protecting the environment or listening to the grievances of the
peoples of the Niger Delta.
The company complained that it suffered from a communication problem,
rather than a real one.
In the weeks after Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed, Shell, which faced a
public corporate crisis,
tried to spin its way out of trouble, spending millions of dollars
justifying its continuing operations
in Nigeria. In the company's adverts and press releases, the
Ogoni were portrayed as violent, as
separatists, as sappateurs, while Shell systematically lied to the
world over its links with the
military regime.
How the truth was manipulated in Nigeria is just one small example
of corporate public relations
industry that spends 35 billion dollars a year protecting business
interests world-wide.
What is PR?
It is the secretive art of subtle manipulation, whose point, in the
words of one Mobil
executive "is getting people to behave the way you hope they will behave
by persuading them
that it is ultimately in their interest to do so".
We should not underestimate the power of corporate PR - Indeed some
people argue that
corporate propaganda threatens democracy itself. As Australian scholar
Alex Carey said:
"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments
of great political
importance; the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power
and the growth of corporate
propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
Lets look at some specific examples of corporate PR at work, and what
we can learn from them.
In 1995, the year Saro-Wiwa was murdered, Shell received a prestigious
Award from the then
Chancellor, Ken Clarke for its range of corporate videos, one of which
was on climate change.
Being the largest global oil company in the world, Shell should be
worried about climate change
It is now an established fact that we are changing the world's climate.
The burning of fossil fuels
is largely to blame. For the last forty years, Shell and the other
fossil fuel companies have
adopted a dinosaur mentality towards climate change. Instead of joining
the debate
constructively, they set out to destroy it. Essentially the oil industry
responded with what we call
the 3-D PR Strategy,
Deny, delay, dominate.
Deny there is a problem with your product.
Delay effective action.
Dominate the international agenda and the marketplace in the search
for alternatives.
The industry has treated climate change as a PR problem - it has funded
so-called independent
scientists and formed green-sounding front groups, such as the Global
Climate Coalition. The
GCC, which was set up in the late eighties, was formed to scupper the
UN Climate negotiations.
In the run up to the Kyoto meeting last December, the GCC spent $60
million dollars trying to
persuade the public that they were not to blame and justify a business
as usual future - even
though that future jeopardizes the long-term viability of life
on earth. The use of climate front
groups, such as the Global Climate Coalition is just one of the many
PR techniques companies
are using to counter the environmental movement.
The techniques are very simple: On the one hand to co-opt the environmental
debate and on the
other to demonize and marginalize the environmental movement.
Co-option can take many forms; Companies have spent billions adopting
the language of the
environmental movement, or greenwashing their products: Motor vehicles,
the fastest growing
source of pollution on the planet, have become "environmentally-friendly".
Aerosols are "ozone
friendly", washing powders are phosphate free, even when most had no
phosphate in them
anyway, aluminium cans and paper bags are not recycled but also recyclable.
Sustainable
development has become one of the most co-opted and corrupted corporate
terms used today.
As well as changing their language, companies have changed their tactics
- We must
understand that for business, establishing links with environmental,
human rights, development
and Indigenous groups and having dialogue with the opposition is a
simple PR technique. I
cannot stress this enough. Dialogue is the most important PR tactic
that companies are using
to overcome objections to their operations.
It is a typical divide and rule tactic. One PR guru has outlined a three
step divide and conquer
strategy on how corporations can defeat public interest activists who
apparently fall into four
distinct categories: "radicals", "opportunists", "idealists"
and "realists".
The goal is to isolate the radicals, "cultivate" the idealists and
"educate" them into becoming
realists, then co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry'.
To this end, Shell has pioneered a sophisticated "stockholder" process,
which it hopes will
become a blueprint for industry to use elsewhere. Having learnt from
its operations in Nigeria and
the Brent Spar fiasco, the company is trying a different tract in Peru,
where it has been exploring
for oil in some of the most culturally and ecologically sensitive rain
forest left on the globe, but
labels it "model sustainable development".
In an unprecedented move, the company held a series of workshops in
Lima, Washington and
London in December 1997 and June 1998 to which some 90 interested groups
or "stake holders"
in its Peruvian Camisea project were invited. Not up for discussion
was whether the project
should go ahead, but how it should go ahead. Meanwhile, the whole process
has divided
different groups on whether to take part in the Shell- initiative.
We can also learn from advice companies like Shell are receiving from
security firms, such as
Control Risks, based in London. In a lecture last autumn, John Bray,
Head of Research at
Control Risks, advised the oil industry how to counter pressure groups,
recommending that:
What is interesting about what Control Risks are saying is that by advocating
companies
operating to global best practice, they are putting forward the same
argument that some
mainstream environmental and development NGOs are. This is exactly
what the companies
want - a harmonization of standards and respectability world-wide,
while they carry on their own
operations, largely on a business as usual scenario.
The most dangerous document is Shell's "Profits and Principles: Does
there have to be a
Choice". "We care what you think about us, it says in hand-writing"
on the inside cover, whilst
also mentioning dialogue. Shell, by the way are also spending $30 million
changing their image.
Despite the great green rhetoric, fundamental differences exist between
Shell's vision and our
vision for the future. Take the issue of globalization. It says in
the Profits and Principles book
that "Shell strongly supports globalization for a way to ensure greater
prosperity for all".
Many people now realize that the issue of globalization is becoming
the most important
ecological, economic and social issue of our time. Globalization represents
a race to the bottom
for the economy, for the environment and for equity. It represents
the age of insecurity for the
likes of you and me. To Shell it represents a business as usual future.
What is our vision for the future?
We cannot just highlight the problems, we also have to start working
on solutions. Do we accept
Shell's and Monsanto's vision of a globalised world dominated by Microsoft
and Mcdonald’s and
other unaccountable corporations, who see no limits to growth or limits
on manipulation of life. In
essence, do we believe that TNCs are part of the solution or problem?
You should ask the Ogoni 19, who were arrested for campaigning against
Shell, who were
arrested by Shell's own Nigerian Police, and who have languished in
jail for four years despite
Shell's newly found commitment to human rights, what they think.
You should ask the Ogoni 19 whether they believe Shell to be part of
the problem or solution.
I think you would find that they believe there is a difference between
principle and profit.
Andrew Rowell is the author of Green Backlash,
Global Subversion of the Environmental
Movement, (Routledge, 1996) and will be speaking on the Counterstrategies
panel.
The main area of Green Backlash work that he has carried on undertaking
has been corporate
PR and the strategies being used by companies against activists.
Quite a lot of this work has
centred around the oil industry and biotech industry, with special
emphasis on the PR initiatives
by Monsanto and Shell. He is one of the very few people in the UK
who tracks companies and their
PR behaviour. He has been a leading dissident against the consensus
that we should sit down and
dialogue with TNCs, and he spoke out against this in a speech given
to 100 leading environmental
and development activists last year, which was co-ordinated by Oxfam.
This is a slightly shortened version of the Oxfam speech.