Civil Society NGOs & Private Sector Com-panies: Towards Cooperation?

Résumé du document

In 2005, DuPont, an American chemical company and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), an environmental advocacy group, engaged in a partnership aiming at ensuring responsible development of a new high-tech domain, nanoscale materials. The project was also aimed at communicating with the global public to improve the general understanding of these new technologies. Because such a project required a broad range of expertise, the partnership brought together both organizations, as well as many other stakeholders such as government agencies, companies, interest groups and universities. In 2007, DuPont and EDF released a 'Nano Risk Framework' on responsible nanoscale materials that was then put to the test and subsequently presented to the wide political and industrial audiences. The framework proved very important because it helped to identify and reduce environmental, health and safety risks posed by this new, developing technology. Why did DuPont and EDF, so different organizations, partner? Basically, both organizations needed the other's expertise and resources. The partnership proved to be highly effective and enabled not only a responsible development of nanoscale materials but also the distribution of an efficient framework.

Extraits

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[...] The best symbol for this is the strategy of Greenpeace (Harter, 2004): Greenpeace protested many times against the actors of global warming by organizing protests or by occupying polluting coal power plants in many countries and even in Arctic region (Reuters, 2009). In fact, confrontation may take many forms, but all have the same goal: raise public awareness and show corporations that they were watched. One may ask, however, why NGOs are considered legitimate by civil society in confronting corporations. [...]

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[...] This partnership is the perfect illustration of the general effectiveness of such cooperation. Indeed, in general, the justifications for cooperation between NGOs and corporations point out the dramatic importance of bringing together the skills and resources of these very different organizations in order to deliver change (Bendell, 2000). They also legitimately emphasize the fact that innovation often arises from this kind of interactions between organizations and individuals that would otherwise not cooperate and therefore creates new skills as well as trust. [...]