Global Compact International Yearbook Ausgabe 2011

Agenda
Blueprint
By Bill Baue and Dr. Marcy Murninghan
The Accountability Web:
Weaving Corporate
Accountability with
Interactive Technologies
It is guerilla warfare out there for companies that are not
careful. Last year, Greenpeace “punked” Nestlé over palm oil
sourcing with a YouTube video and Facebook campaign. In
April 2011, The Yes Men punked GE over tax payments with a
fake press release, and coal companies over “clean coal” with
a hoax website. These are just a few high-profile examples of
activist campaigns seeking to hold companies accountable
through social media and other web-based tools. On the flip
side, companies such as Shell, Patagonia, Timberland, Natura,
SAP, and Guardian News & Media use social media to proactively
engage stakeholders, which enhances their corporate
sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) work
in innovative ways.
Using Web 2.0 tools for corporate accountability makes inherent
sense, as they share a common thread: Both are rooted in
interaction and thrive on engagement. We call this intersection
The Accountability Web, the title of the report we wrote
last year during a research fellowship for the CSR Initiative at
the Harvard Kennedy School. In it, we identified the dynamic
nature of accountability, which “establishes a dialogic relationship”
between actors on all sides of the equation, according
to academic Andreas Schedler.
While Tim Berners-Lee included interactivity into his 1989
conception of the World Wide Web, it remained latent for the
medium’s first decade – it was not until the late 1990s that
interactive Web 2.0 applications began emerging in earnest.
Likewise, corporate accountability has lagged in its interactive
potential, with most early-stage accountability taking the
form of one-way campaigns, with companies and stakeholders
talking at each other more than with each other.
From Accountability 1.0 to Accountability 2.0
Borrowing from computer terminology, we dubbed this dynamic
Accountability 1.0, which creates self-reinforcing feedback loops
of antagonism, confrontation, and mistrust between companies
and stakeholders. At about the same time the web went interactive,
so too did accountability with the advent of multistakeholder
initiatives such as the Global Reporting Initiative and
Forest Stewardship Council – ushering in Accountability 2.0.
Characterized by two-way communication and cooperation,
Accountability 2.0 allows actors in the accountability ecosystem
to continue disagreeing over substantive issues while engaging
in respectful dialog toward the goal of mutual understanding
and compromise leading to solutions. This progression also
shifts from the unidirectional Accountability 1.0 practice
of one group seeking to hold the other accountable, to the
multidirectional Accountability 2.0 practice of groups being
accountable vis-à-vis each other – otherwise known as
mutual accountability, a core concept in civil society and the
field of sustainable development institutionalized in the Paris
Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.
These notions align with thought leadership that emerged in
2011. For example, in a January/February 2011 Harvard Business
Review cover article, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer
advocate for “creating shared value” that benefits business and
society – an outcome that requires communication between
companies, governments, civil society, and other stakeholders
to identify mutual priorities. The next month, HBR published
“Capitalism for the Long Term,” in which Dominic Barton of
McKinsey argued for “fighting the tyranny of short-termism” by
“serving stakeholders” as a means of “enriching shareholders”
over the long term. Here again: Serving stakeholders requires
engaging them on equal terms.
In his February 2011 book, The Age of Responsibility, Wayne
Visser describes a progression from “paternalistic” CSR 1.0
to “collaborative” CSR 2.0 built on principles of “connectedness,”
“responsiveness,” and “circularity” – all elements of
stakeholder engagement. And Umair Haque’s January 2011
book, The New Capitalist Manifesto, similarly advocates “responsiveness”
that moves “from value propositions to value
conversations.” Says Haque: “Imagine an economy powered
by organizations whose stakeholders are all associating, deliberating,
and participating in public spaces.” In other words,
interacting in the Accountability Web.
Weaving the Accountability Web
Reeling from the mid-1990s Brent Spar and Saro-Wiwa controversies,
Shell moved more proactively into risk-avoidance by
ramping up its stakeholder engagement (among other tactics).
In 1998, the company became one of the first to experiment
with leveraging the interactivity of the web to engage with
stakeholders through its TellShell portal. In 2007, Shell rebranded
this effort ShellDialogues with a dedicated website
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