STATEMENT: Corporate Accountability International Campaigns Director Responds to the Public Eye 2010 Greenwashing Awards

Patti Lynn, Corporate Accountability International Campaigns Director
Statement in Response to the Public Eye 2010 Greenwashing Awards
January 27, 2010

Corporate Accountability International congratulates the Polaris Institute for its successful effort to nominate the CEO Water Mandate for the Public Eye’s Greenwashing Award. We also would like to thank the sponsoring organizations and the jury of the Public Eye Awards for casting their votes for the CEO Water Mandate as the “winner” of the first ever “Greenwashing” awards presented at the Public Eye Awards.  These awards shine a spotlight on some of the worst corporate abusers, influence-peddlers and greenwashers. 

We hope that this award will continue to put pressure on the corporate endorsers of the CEO Water Mandate, and will further move our public officials, including those at the UN, to address the concerns raised by millions of people around the world.  In the end, water is a basic human right and part of an ecological trust, and people, not corporations, should be in the driver’s seat when decisions are being made about how best to manage a resource essential to all life, for now and future generations.

Right now, corporate leaders are once again gathering for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. They will deliberate on how to best to resuscitate the staggering global economy, weakened in large part by the irresponsible investment and lending practices of some of the world’s largest banking and financial services corporations and led by many of the same corporate CEOs now winging their way to Davos. 

It also is worth noting that just this past week, in the United States, a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key political campaign finance laws and opened the floodgates for an unprecedented level of corporate cash into the U.S. political system. 

Whether in Davos or in D.C., today’s global corporations continue to assert even greater control of our democratic political systems, our livelihoods, and our natural world, even as all three stand on the brink of widespread and lasting damage. Increasingly, corporations claim that their efforts to gain this control while avoiding accountability for their actions are actually examples of how corporation are “part of the solution” to the world’s problems. 

The CEO Water Mandate is one illustration of this last disturbing trend.  The CEO Water Mandate is a corporate-driven voluntary initiative, housed with the United Nations’ Global Compact, itself a non-binding voluntary initiative led by corporations in “partnership” with the United Nations. Not coincidentally, the CEO Water Mandate was founded in June 2007 by corporations such as Coke, Nestlé and Suez, who were facing growing resistance from people around the world for trying to transform water into a high-priced commodity to be sold to the highest bidder presenting a grave threat to people’s access to water. 

The CEO Water Mandate is presented by its endorsers as a prime example of environmental stewardship and corporate social responsibility.  However, the real agenda of the CEO Water Mandate appears to be to facilitate greater control over water sources and services by for-profit corporations. The bottom line is that voluntary initiatives like those used within the CEO Water Mandate in collaboration with corporations have been shown to be flawed. Not only are the principles of such agreements often narrowly conceived, but the companies typically fail to put them into practice.  Corporations are also allowed to “opt in” or “opt out” of the standards set, allowing them to pick and choose which “standards” to abide by.  Such conditions make it easy for companies to continue practices that harm people or the environment, while at the same working to weaken oversight of their practices, still being seen as “clean and green.”  Voluntary initiatives are often a strategy used to undermine more meaningful oversight of corporate practices.  Overall, the CEO Water Mandate continues to be a prime example of “green-washing”
on the part of major corporations.
 
Since 2007, Corporate Accountability International has been partnering with the Polaris Institute and many other activists, organizations and social movements from around the world to counter the efforts of the so-called Mandate’s endorsers to undermine and co-opt the debate around how best to protect and govern our global water resources and systems.  We have called on the leaders of the United Nations to stop legitimizing this initiative, and to instead stand up for public democratic control of water. 

About efforts to challenge the CEO Water Mandate
•    For more information on Corporate Accountability International’s efforts to challenge the CEO Water Mandate and promote a “corporate-free” United Nations, click here.
•    For more information on the nomination of the CEO Water Mandate for the Public Eye’s Greenwashing Award, click here.

About the Public Eye Awards
The Public Eye Awards (formerly Public Eye on Davos) are “a critical counterpoint to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.” Organized since 2000 by the Berne Declaration (BD) and Pro Natura (the latter replaced by Greenpeace in 2009), The Public Eye Awards remind the players of the global economy who impact people and the environment with destructive business practices that actions have consequences – in this case for the image of the company. For more information, click here.