Un text mai vechi din The Economist despre colaborarea dintre societatea civilă verde şi companii (mulţumesc, Mircea!):

Activists and companies can move from confrontation to co-operation.

(…) Firms are keen to form partnerships with environmental groups precisely to avoid being accused of “greenwashing”. Besides providing expertise, activists can lend credibility to a company’s environmental programmes. Whether activists are “selling out” when they deal with big firms is the subject of much debate.

Yet alliances between companies and activists are not as strange as they might seem. For bosses planning long-term capital investments, says Michael Lenox, an expert on corporate sustainability at Duke University, “uncertainty is more damaging than regulation.” This puts bosses in the same boat as activists: both want regulators to hurry up and set the rules. “We can’t solve these big global challenges without business engagement,” says Mr Cramer, “and business can’t operate without solving these problems. So there is philosophical alignment.”

Even so, there is a limit to how much voluntary action can achieve, says James Speth, dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. In a new book, “The Bridge at the Edge of the World”, he argues that environmental externalities are an unavoidable feature of capitalism, and that bosses are trapped in a system that requires them to act unsustainably when they have the chance. “In the end,” he says, “a responsible company is one that is required to be responsible by law.” But until regulators act, companies may find that teaming up with activists is the best hedge against uncertainty.

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Tags: companies, CSR, green activists, greenwashing, the economist