Speaking at WWF’s summit in Vancouver recently, I was forcibly struck by the impact of The Death of Environmentalism paper by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. The sub-title was Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World. For better or worse, the level of concern about Death suggests it has hit a nerve in the environmentalist community. This provocation was long overdue.
That said, environmentalism is not dead, of course, no more than CSR is. But just as we are approaching the poppable extremities of a ‘CSR bubble’, so environmentalism is going through yet another phase change. Past changes saw preservation give way to conservation, and conservation to environmentalism, green politics/consumerism and sustainable development. Now we are moving towards a period of growing demand for scalable, entrepreneurial solutions to problems like climate change, from awareness-raising, agenda-shaping and partnership-building. Indeed, it is no accident that Death’s cover shows the Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’, which any self-respecting environmentalist knows is composed of the characters for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’.
In our work on global civil society, most recently The 21st Century NGO, we underscore several trends. First, civil society organisations are increasingly vital to the health of democratic societies. Second, the challenges will continue to grow, often faster than they can handle.
Third, while governments and business may still resist NGO advocacy, there is now a real interest in the roles such organisations can play in developing and deploying solutions. Fourth, a new market-focused opportunity space is opening up. Fifth, this represents a challenge even for mainstream NGOs, so effective public and private sector partnerships are essential to leverage change. Sixth, new forms of competition are evolving in the ‘NGO market’, with new entrants like companies (think General Electric), business networks (think WBCSD) and social entrepreneurs blurring traditional boundaries. Seventh, but by no means last, the mainstreaming trend is exposing NGOs to new accountability demands, at a time when traditional sources of NGO funding are being squeezed.
If you are the chief executive of an environmental NGO, you’ll probably welcome GE’s new Ecomagination (see page 8) initiative. CEO Jeff Immelt is raising expectations and beginning to address the question of how we scale up our responses to climate change. Maybe, too, you support the call by 24 CEOs of leading companies on G8 leaders to take more effective action in this area (see page 5) And perhaps you are also busily circulating the article by McKinsey’s worldwide managing director Ian Davis in The Economist’s business and society series.
But beware: these are early warning signals that the mainstreaming and scaling up of society’s responses to environmental issues like climate change has begun. Just as climate change will drive a multi-decade period of ‘creative destruction’ across markets, value chains, companies and technologies, so the new order will also shake up civil society’s organisations and institutions. There will be a shakeout of NGOs and of those who intermediate between civil society and business or governments. Many CSR departments will be downsized or disbanded as their activities are integrated into the rest of the business. And we will see a similar riddling of the socially responsible investment field, with many SRI funds either disappearing or being acquired by mainstream funds.
There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about all of this: it’s simply the way capitalist economies handle challenges on the scale of those we now face. And the opportunity space is huge. Look for clues on how all of this will play out in the following pages.
John Elkington is a co-founder and Chairman of thinktank and strategy consultancy SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com) and member of [i]Briefing’s[/i] editorial advisory panel. John has authored or co-authored 16 books, including 1988’s million-selling Green Consumer Guide and Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business(1997), and has written or co-written some 40 published reports. He is chair of the Environment Foundation and the Social and Environmental and Committee of the Association of Chartered and Certified Accountants (ACCA). John is currently working on a book about social entrepreneurs with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation. (www.johnelkington.com
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