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12. Business-NGO Collaboration on Peace Building
- University of Notre Dame Press
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221 12 | Business-NGO Collaboration on Peace Building Patterns of Convergence Hal Culbertson contemporary conflicts create significant challenges for meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Since the end of the cold War, most armed conflicts have been civil wars, in many cases involving influence or resources from neighboring states.1 These conflicts are most severe on civilian populations, who have significantly higher fatalities than soldiers or members of militant groups.2 civilians also suffer from mass internal displacements or refugee flows; the recruitment , sometimes under duress, of militants and child soldiers from civilian populations; terrorism and gross human rights violations against members of opposing ethnic, religious, or political groups; and the entrenchment of animosity, discrimination, and intolerance in societal institutions, including educational, civil, legal, security, and commercial institutions. Frequently, conflicts lead to entitlement and market failures , as well as high costs that are unevenly distributed across groups in society, which in turn undermines progress on the development goals.3 The MDGs do not explicitly mention peace as a goal. The goals themselves hew much closer to orthodox development objectives of increasing incomes, expanding agriculture, and enhancing human 222 Hal Culbertson flourishing.4 Indeed, some have criticized the MDGs as providing incentives for quick fixes for problems of poverty without addressing the underlying social, political, and economic causes.5 however, as the Millennium Declaration, which announced the MDGs, made clear, reducing conflict and building more peaceful societies is clearly an underlying agenda of the MDGs.6 Furthermore, there are important links between development and conflict. Paul collier and others dub conflict as “development in reverse,” both because it pulls people away from more productive pursuits, and because of its destructive impact on human and physical resources.7 As humphreys and Varshney conclude, “The success of the MDG project will depend in large part on its success in countries in conflict or at-risk of conflict.”8 Given the broad social, economic, and political destruction they cause, contemporary conflicts require equally broad and diverse interventions to build peace. As a result, a broad array of private actors, including religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, labor unions, educational institutions, health care institutions, and the business community , are increasingly recognizing the need to consider their role in peace building. This chapter will focus on the role of both businesses and nGos in peace building, giving particular attention to the kinds of collaborative alliances that have formed between businesses and nGos in this area. Business-nGo alliances have emerged in a wide variety of areas in recent years, from environmental and human rights issues, to poverty, health care, and emergency relief. After a preliminary consideration of some of the main conditions affecting business-nGo collaboration , this chapter will explore how both entities have understood their new roles in peace building and make some observations about emerging patterns of collaboration on peace building. The DYnAMIcS oF BuSIneSS-nGo coLLABoRATIon collaboration between nGos and businesses is increasing.9 Just a few decades ago, most interactions between businesses and nGos were conflictual. nGos criticized multinational companies for contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and human rights violations, [3.90.242.249] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:21 GMT) Business-nGo collaboration on Peace Building 223 even as businesses sought to ignore or sideline the campaigns of nGos against them. In the intervening years, nGos have grown stronger in size, reputation, and influence, while the business community has increasingly recognized its responsibility to wider society and the need to work with a broader array of stakeholders. This section will provide a framework for understanding businessnGo collaboration, which will be applied to collaborations on peace building later in the chapter. The framework focuses on different levels of collaboration between businesses and nGos and gives attention to the significance of patterns of collaboration between particular industries and social sectors. Levels of collaboration Many have begun to explore the dynamics that move business-nGo relationships from conflict to collaboration. As Bas Arts observes about environmental collaborations, nGos and businesses have often moved from highly antagonistic relationships to more collaborative partnerships , sometimes in a fairly short time span. he points out that in 1995, Greenpeace decided to oppose the decommissioning and sinking of the Brent Spar, an oil platform in the north Sea, and launched a campaign against Shell, which owned the platform.10 Greenpeace activists undertook a highly publicized occupation of the platform, creating a public movement that ultimately led Shell to scrap plans to decommission the platform. Greenpeace later had to admit that...