The preface provides an overview of how campaigns to change corporate environmental and social practices have evolved over the last 40 years. It provides brief summaries of several seminal campaigns that expanded the range of issues addressed by these campaigns, their strategy and tactics, and the subsequent policies and institutions that resulted.
This chapter provides a broad overview of the social and environmental threats that major industries and the corporations therein pose. It documents how corporations externalize their costs, avoid, or weaken government regulations, and evade accountability for the damage they cause to people and the environment. It makes the case for strong civil society activism to bring corporations back in service to all citizens and the earth.
Campaigns to modify corporate behavior are all different, but there are categories into which most of them fit. Those categories include specific company campaigns, industry corporate campaigns, upstream financial and downstream markets campaigns, government bank shot campaigns to change corporations and corporate bank shot campaigns to change government policy.
This chapter provides an overview of each of the major tracks and how they fit into the overall corporate campaign. These include: shareholder resolutions, government policy and legislation, legal suits, insider consultation, and direct field and digital actions.
Every corporate campaign proceeds on a different course, but there are stages that they often pass through. These include: documenting the harm, selecting a target company, building an alliance, developing a strategy, launching the campaign, escalating the campaign, negotiating an agreement, institutionalizing the agreement, expanding the campaign to the next target companies.