Shell aren’t having a good time of it at the moment. Having recently admitted that their actions in the Niger delta may have contributed to human rights violations, and facing scrutiny for overstating its oil reserves (thereby artificially inflating the value of their assets) they are now facing allegations that they haven’t lived up to their own ‘green pledge’.
According to today’s Guardian, Friends of the Earth, the environmental group, today accused oil giant Shell of failing to live up to its promise of environmental and social responsibility.
A couple of years ago, Oxfam put on a day of workshops for those involved in online activism and advocacy. The idea was to draw together those working to model new ways of running conversations, campaigns and NGOs online, to share best practice and to seek ways of working together. In order to provide some food for thought a member of parliament was invited to address us, as was, controversially, a representative of Shell.
That representative attempted to outline the steps Shell had taken to make their website an interactive space where their consumers could challenge them on issues (such as their human rights and environmental records, papers on which were floating round the room) and receive answers on how the company worked. Despite that representative’s enthusiasm, not many were convinced. The examples offered were certainly open to the interpretation that Shell was simply using this section of their website (one that I can no longer find from a quick browse) to pick issues that their PR department needed to work on. Without any real commitment to transparency.
That is, of course, one of the factors that was often left out in early discussions of the impact of the web. The web certainly does allow much streamlined access to information about a given body, but that information is simply what they choose to make available. And while use of a website can give consumers (and other interested parties) greater access to an organisation, that needn’t be followed by any accountability of either party to the other.
In fact, Shell is accountable to two groups: consumers and shareholders. And it is in the relationship of management with the latter group that more concern can be raised. Last week, The Guardian reported that The embattled oil giant Shell today bowed to pressure from big shareholders to provide details of its corporate governance review. The company phrased it a little differently:
On March 5, 2004, Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies announced that it wishes to consider the views of shareholders and various advisory bodies in respect of the structure and overall governance of the Group.
But with either choice of phraseology something isn’t quite right here. Certainly a large corporation can’t go back to its massed shareholders for input to every decision, that is why the company has a Board, but they are accountable to those shareholders, and to continue the Guardian’s sadly fair characterisation, those shareholders should not have to ‘prise’ anything open.
Situations of this sort would appear to reinforce the notion that new measures are needed to ensure that large corporations remain accountable outside of their own board room. When they have a track record as poor as Shell’s, perhaps it is worth noting the words of Friends of the Earth’s Executive Director, Tony Juniper:
“Unlike shareholders,the communities living next door to Shell have little or no rights of redress. Many suffer ill health, pollution and environmental damage as a result of Shell’s pursuit of profits. It is time the British Government legislated and gave communities the right to protection from such corporate abuse. And they must be compensated when abuse occurs.”