Resources: Article

The Corner House interviewed by the US magazine, Multinational Monitor, on export credit agencies and corruption.

An accessible article from "Z Magazine" describing the key issues of global climate change discussed at last year's climate negotiations in Montreal.

Carbon markets are not helping to phase out fossil fuels and are thus not helping to tackle global warming, this article for Foreign Policy in Focus argues.

Northern institutions have a significant impact on corruption in developing countries, particularly in the form of bribery by Northern companies and money laundering by Northern banks of the proceeds of corruption. Northern states have been directly and indirectly complicit in these activities, primarily by turning a blind eye and failing to take action. If corruption is be tackled internationally, the Northern state itself needs to be redesigned.

Seeing social or technical change as the application of new "theory" to "practice" is one of the hazards of 21st-century middle-class life. Middle-class activists could take a leaf from both expert elites and grassroots movements, who both tend to know better.

It is difficult to obtain enough human eggs from women for cloning research. This article explores the problems encountered; whether women should be paid for their eggs; the growing international trade in women's eggs; the concept of informed consent and choice; and the public money pouring into cloning research.

Infrastructure development is the point at which many conflicts, both past and future, over resources and decision-making meet. Several projects proposed or being implemented in Turkey illustrate these points.

Far-right groups in Britain are increasingly using environmental and social justice concerns to argue against immigration. This is part of a clear political strategy to make racist ideas and goals seem more respectable. Whether they like it or not, environmentalists are therefore being increasingly drawn into debates on immigration, refugees and asylum seekers. To counter this strategy, environmental groups need to link with those who have to deal with racism every day as a matter of strategy, process and structure.

In February 2004, the Sunday Times newspaper published an article by Michael Gillard, detailing reports that the coating selected to seal the joints of the BTC oil pipeline before it was buried was "utterly inappropriate" and could cause the pipeline to leak. This expanded article provides more detail.

The World Trade Organisation's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) could have a significant effect on human health, and health care services.

In July 2000, 19 corporations and individuals were being prosecuted in the Lesotho courts for bribing a top official in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (a scheme intended to divert water from Lesotho to South Africa). This presentation explores the daily institutional practices that actively encourage the flouting of guidelines and anti-corruption regulations. It sheds light on the institutionalised racism that assumes the Third World to be inherently corrupt and corruptible, a view that underwrites bribery.

Since October 2000, the UK Export Credits Guarantees Department (ECGD) has been bound by the UK Human Rights Act. But many of the ECGD's procedures potentially conflict with this Act.

Publicly-traded companies involved in resource exploitation should be required to publish a breakdown of all payments which they make for the products of every country in which they operate.

Arms sales currently take up a disproportionate amount of official export credit support. The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) and other Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) should end support for military goods.

The ECGD's support for defence-related exports has lost money every year for the past 12 years. This strongly suggests that arms sales are being deliberately subsidised.

The Kyoto Protocol is not a step forward in the struggle to stabilise climate, but a stumble sideways into spurious science and the privatization of the atmosphere, contends this talk given at the "Resistance is Fertile" gathering in The Hague, The Netherlands

This analysis of the changing language used in discussions of human embryo cloning was presented at a conference addressing "Techniques of Reproduction: Media, Life, Discourse" at the University of Paderborn, Germany.

In January 2001, the UK parliament voted to allow research on embryo stem cells. Media reporting suggested this was an easy decision with which the majority of people agreed. Yet other examples suggest unease among the general public and parliamentarians in Britain about several issues involving life and death; sickness and health; and doctors and scientists. In anticipation of such unease and growing public distrust in scientists and government, many discussions and debates about embryo research have been channelled in certain directions so as to ‘engineer consent’ to such research.

When Dolly the cloned sheep was announced in early 1997, the government in the UK stated that cloning techniques must never be applied to humans. Yet in August 2000, it recommended that the law be amended to allow the first stages of embryo cloning and related research to go ahead. This article provides a brief resume of some government, institutional and media responses to human cloning, interspersed with reflections on these trends and omissions.

International groups campaigning against the controversial Ilisu Dam in Turkey obtained a copy of an assessment, commissioned by the export credit agencies considering financial support for the project, of the Turkish Government’s proposed resettlement plan. The assessment highlights serious problems with resettlement and reveals that two to three times more people may be affected than previously estimated -- possibly as many as 70,000 people, mainly ethnic Kurds.

Tradeable carbon credits from forests cannot be scientifically quantified. NGOs interested in participating in markets for such credits need to be aware of the climatic damage they sanction as well as the damage they may do to communities affected by fossil fuel exploitation.

The intersections between international nature conservation and ethnic politics are of serious and growing concern to many social movements in Southeast Asia. This paper offers evidence that international environmentalist practices interact with local and national conditions to advance the structural work of ethnic discrimination and racism in Southeast Asia. The racist outcomes of these practices do not flow exclusively from unprofessionalism, faulty science, irrationality, immorality or incorrect beliefs -- and anti-racist strategy has to accommodate this insight.

This presentation challenges four myths about large dams: they provide a cheap and economic source of energy;  are an environmentally-benign source of energy; are uncontroversial in Europe; and result from impartial decision-making processes. It poses several detailed questions for the World Commission on Dams.

Violence over and against forests cannot be explained by population increase nor by other linear, office-bound models of change which pit abstracted “humans” against an abstracted “nature”. This book chapter uses examples from England hundreds of years ago and from Viet Nam during the US war there to show that local people’s struggle for their rights to use the forests were continually threatened and partly defined by interests operating outside the forests.

This article argues that companies seeking public money in the form of grants or subsidies should put forward proposals which can be subject to public scrutiny and accountability.

Overconsumption is possible only by dividing different groups of people from each other. A different, more democratic pattern of political action will be required to lower consumption.

This talk looks at the politics of everyday life and its effects on the science lab; how the funding of science affects the view of the world that science portrays; and how the daily social and economic pressures of everyday life affect the direction and outcomes of scientific research.

A presentation looking at whose interests the free market serves and whose environment is protected by market instruments such as labelling and property rights which concludes that leaving the environment to the market is a recipe for social injustice, authoritarianism, neo-colonialism and ecological suicide.

Swedish-Swiss engineering company Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) has supplied generators for hydroelectric dams around the world, accounting for one-fifth of the world’s hydropower capacity. This analysis provides financial reasons why ABB should not continue to be involved in the hydropower sector. It forecasts a shrinking market because of substantial and growing opposition to large dams and insufficient private and public finance to build them. Its findings were circulated to ABB shareholders and financial journalists. In March 2000, ABB decided to sell its hydropower division, mentioning shareholders’ sensitivity to the significant environmental, human rights and social impacts of large-scale dams.

The package of economic reforms that the World Bank has promoted in recent years -- from privatisation of state or public services and assets to deregulation of labour and environmental laws -- has, in theory, been intended to remove the state from all but a minimal role in the national economy. The best government is considered to be the least government. Yet the practical outcome of these free-market policies has been to increase and redirect the state’s power in favour of transnational interests. Resistance to the “free market state” is growing, as is the demand that the state’s powers be used to protect the interests and rights of citizens, not corporations.

Discussions of population and food supply that leave out the relationships of power between different groups of people will always mask the true nature of food scarcity -- who gets to eat and who doesn’t -- and lead to “solutions” that are simplistic, frequently oppressive and that, ultimately, reinforce the very structures creating ecological damage and hunger. 

Increasingly, multilateral development banks are funding private companies to undertake projects, underwriting the investments through guarantees or providing loans direct to the companies involved. Development is effectively being “privatised”. For companies, a raft of new “corporate welfare” programmes are on offer.

Transnational companies develop extensive networks so they can fashion the political infrastructure that permits them to capture subsidies, manage demand, create new markets, centralize power, enclose new environments, and evade, digest and regulate resistance.

This presentation to the Soil Association's Annual Conference recognises that the UK government has publicly renounced industrialised, chemical-based agriculture in favour of “sustainable agriculture”. Under Agenda 21, the action plan for sustainable development signed at the Rio Earth Summit (UNCED) in 1992, it is committed to Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development or SARD, drawn up by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Yet SARD’s understanding of people’s participation, land reform, sustainable agriculture and environmental protection are quite different from that of many people’s movements. For SARD, participation is about engineering consent and getting people to participate in implementing decisions that have already been taken by someone else. SARD calls for land reform to promote is agribusiness’ access to land, not people’s control over it. And despite the rhetoric, SARD is about agricultural intensification. Overall, the policy is the same, but the language has changed.

Different actors -- transnational corporations, political and technocratic elites, their opponents and others -- contend with and influence what is loosely called “globalization” in different ways. Constructive and engaged understanding of the power struggles between them all and their resources, motivations, dynamics, strategies, effectiveness, and capacities for alliances requires coming to grips with the ways in which they interpret and present their own struggles.

A presentation looking at the forces which have degraded the earth and which now propose to manage its recovery through processes such as “sustainable development”.

The commons is neither private nor public: neither business firm nor state utility, neither jealously guarded private plot nor national or city park. Industrial development has been possible only through dismantling the commons and harnessing the fragments to build up new economic and social patterns responsive to the interests of a dominant minority from which the great mass of humanity (particularly women) are excluded. Such enclosure has never gone unchallenged, however: resistance takes place in countless everyday ways in both the South and the North.

Corporate and legislative responses to reproductive hazards in the workplace have been based on ideological assumptions about human reproduction and working women. The controversy surrounding US employers’ recent practices of excluding women from work where they might come into contact with known or suspected reproductive hazards has made these misconceptions explicit -- clarified the direction of more constructive action.

Molecular biologists now claim that they can link specific DNA sequences to specific diseases, forms of human behaviour and social conditions -- from diabetes and cystic fibrosis to homosexuality, alcoholism, intelligence and even homelessness. Although based on flawed science, such claims are being used to divert attention from environmental factors in disease and to legitimise new forms of intervention in social life. The myth of the “all powerful gene” threatens to impose a new eugenics -- with “normality” defined by arbitrary models of a standard human.

Effective political struggle in intercultural space means creatively weaving in and out of all the cultures present.

“My enemy’s enemies may not be my friends . . . but they may be useful”. When groups campaigning for change make alliances with other groups without reference to specific struggles or grassroots groups involved, when they find common ground only by setting aside critical issues, and when none of the groups have to live with the consequences of their actions, such alliances can marginalize those for whom political struggle is not just another campaign but a defence of livelihood.

Relationships of power determine which truths can be spoken and when. Power is not a black box but a set of social meshes that we Western environmentalists must work within and against. This review of four books offers useful new tools for achieving a different political and self-awareness.