Resources

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

Multilateral agencies have been promoting the commoditization of land in the Mekong region. How is this project being advanced and resisted?

This submission outlines how and why the UK Department for International Development (DfiD), and the multilateral agencies and non-governmental agencies to which its contributes, should act to curb emissions of greenhouse gases in developed countries. It recommends that the UK should support: initiatives to keep fossil fuels in the ground; alternative sources of energy; and movements working towards these ends.

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.

This Review evaluates the extent to which the Environmental Impact Assessment Report (EIAR) and Resettlement Action Plan for the Ilisu Dam and related hydroelectric projects demonstrate compliance with international guidelines, legal obligations and export credit agency conditions on resettlement of those who would have to move because of the Dam.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is revising its General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) so as to increase international trade in services. If current proposals are implemented, GATS could be used to overturn almost any legislation governing services. Particularly under threat are public services -- health care, education, energy, water and sanitation. This briefing explores the potential for private companies to capture the most profitable components of publicly-provided and -funded health care services, leaving a reduced public sector to cope with the elderly, chronically sick and the poor who most need health care and who can least afford it.

This report raises concerns over Balfour Beatty's management of major "reputational risks" that could severely damage the company's standing. It includes a motion tabled at the annual shareholders’ meeting questioning the company’s involvement in the proposed Ilisu Dam and urging Balfour Beatty to adopt the guidelines of the World Commission on Dams.

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.

Vast plantations of genetically modified (GM) trees would undoubtedly have significant social and environmental impacts, including displacement of people from their lands, and pollen and gene drift to non-GM trees. GM trees are a technofix for problems created by industrial pulpwood plantations and the worldwide paper, timber and fruit industries. Tackling the challenge posed by GM trees entails alliance building with groups ranging from seed savers to communities battling encroachment of industrial tree farms on their land.

This Corner House submission to British House of Commons' International Development Committee's Inquiry into corruption urges the Committee to examine the structural causes of corruption in the countries of the South, such as the policies and programmes that Western governments and agencies push on these countries. It recommends that the Committee focus less on the perceived "lack of political will" to tackle corruption and more on those vested interests that generate immense political will to block investigations when they are initiated and to undermine anti-corruption drives.

Unless Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) can demonstrate a public purpose, ensured through mandatory sustainable development standards, the subsidies they provide have no legitimacy.

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.

In July 1999, the UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry announced a Review of the mission and status of the UK Export Credits Guarantees Department (ECGD). This Memorandum, signed by 35 UK NGOs and parliamentarians, sets out proposals to reform the ECGD so as to bring it in line with the stated policies of the UK government on sustainable development, human rights, open government and putting ethics “at the centre” of foreign policy.

“Moral dilemmas” are not unattached to political, bureaucratic, social and economic interests. They are deeply political and are products of everyday conflicts over meaning, resources and ways of living and power. Who raises a particular moral dilemma and why is thus of critical importance.

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.

European dam builders, suppliers and consultants continue to promote and export their technologies to the countries of the South. In doing so, they tend to ignore, misrepresent or downplay many of the negative environmental, social and economic impacts of large dams that have discredited the dam building industry in Europe. This report presents the track record of the major European companies involved in large dams, detailed by company and by dams in Turkey, Lesotho, Paraguay/Argentina/Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, India, Malaysia and China.

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.

This article outlines two options put forward to tackle global warming -- reduce fossil fuel use or plant trees to absorb carbon dioxide -- and analyses the substantial differences between the two approaches.

The BTC Consortium negotiated several legal agreements with each of the three countries through which its Caspian oil pipeline crosses.

Decision-makers around the world use cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to decide whether or not to build dams, roads and airports; what actions to take over global warming, biodiversity loss and soil erosion; what health care and occupational safety policies to adopt; and so forth. Grassroots opponents of roads and hydroelectric dams, however, have persistently contested the ways CBA values land, forests, streams, fisheries and livelihoods.

This summary of a conference held in 1999 at Yale University, co-organized by The Corner House, is also available above in Bahasa Indonesia in a translation made in 2022 by Hendro Sangkoyo of the School of Democratic Economics. For related work on cost-benefit analysis see http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/toward-different-debate-environmental-accounting and http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/whose-voice-speaking.

Projects backed by export credit agencies (ECAs) are frequently environmentally destructive, socially oppressive or financially unviable. It is the poorest people in the countries where the projects are located who end up paying the bill. With rare exceptions, the major ECAs lack mandatory environmental and development standards, and are secretive and unaccountable.

This short article from 1993, from the journal Medicine and War, argues that the 1992 Earth Summit failed to address key issues of land distribution, rights and security. In doing so, it made it impossible to address its own purported environmental goals, which require respect for ordinary people's efforts to conserve the land and forests on which they depend.

Many internal wars in Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, far from representing societal breakdown, can be seen as a rational response on the part of rulers (and would-be rulers) to ensure their economic and political survival in a context of globalisation and the changing nation-state.

Au sein du mouvement écologiste occidental une aile conservatrice importante a développé, dans un souci de stabilité sociale, des conceptions sur la "culture" qui placent la cause profonde des "conflits ethniques" dans des antagonismes anciens, définitifs, implacables et invétérés entre populations. Ces conceptions sont très proches de celles de la Nouvelle Droite qui, de plus en plus, s'approprie le langage de la "différence" culturelle pour promouvoir un "racisme différencialiste". Il est important que les groupes progressistes s’opposent à cette manupulation politique d'éthnicité des environnementalistes conservateurs, ou de la Nouvelle Droite.

A summary of the ecological risks of genetic engineering in agriculture and suggestions for resisting its introduction.

The biotechnology industry claims that genetic engineering in agriculture is necessary to feed a growing world population. Yet, far from preventing world starvation, genetic engineering threatens to exacerbate the social and ecological causes of hunger by forcing farmers to pay for their right to fertile seeds, threatening crop yields, undermining biodiversity and reducing the access of poorer people to food.

Popular opposition and changing macro-economic policies have disproved the claim that large-scale hydrolectric dams provide a cheap, reliable and economic source of power.

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.

Opinion polls and cost-benefit analysis, like public relations, attempt to construct new, simplified “publics” which are friendly to bureaucracies, politicians and corporations. The success of these attempts is limited by popular resistance at many levels. For a related article, see http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/toward-different-debate-environmental-accounting.

The practical outcome of free-market policies has not been to diminish the state’s power -- but to redirect it in favour of transnational interests. Thus the power of many Northern states to intervene in the economic and social affairs of other countries has increased. 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.

All development projects follow a three-act dramatic plotline, as development agencies try to impose plans, meet local opposition, and improvise freely in an attempt to overcome resistance.

This 1991 article describes a non-aggressive form of irrigation formerly common in Northern Thailand, in which land, water, forest, agriculture and the spirits thereof form an ecological whole. The system holds signficant lessons for the current international discussion on the "rights of nature."

Most scientists agree that human-made emissions of greenhouse gases have to be reduced signifiantly. The North is the main emitter of these gases and should make the most cuts. Many Southern countries argue that emission targets should be set on a per capita basis within a framework of “contraction and convergence”: per capita emissions should converge globally to an agreed ceiling, allowing emissions of developing countries to increase and those of developed countries to contract.

Living organisms can now be patented as “inventions” if they are the result of genetic engineering techniques or of the transfer of genes between totally unrelated species of plants, animals and micro-organisms. Yet patents can hinder research, legalise biopiracy and restrict both competition and people’s access to health treatment.

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is often regarded as a pure form of practical reasoning that can shift accountability onto supposedly impersonal mechanisms, summarize complex choices in a formulaic way, and transmute popular pressure, political debate and political conflict into quiet, office-bound operations performed on fixed and agreed-upon preferences. Yet CBA’s commensuration of things that no one has any experience in commensurating leads to odd new ways of treating reason, democracy, public opinion, space, time and personhood. And the more practical steps are taken toward its algorithmic ideal of decision-making, the more unforeseen political and social difficulties crop up, including popular resistance. For other work on cost-benefit analysis see http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/whose-voice-speaking and http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/toward-different-debate-environmental-accounting.

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.

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.

This essay sketches some of the pressures behind -- and some of the dangers of -- the expansion of the pulp and paper industry in Southeast Asia over the last decade. It describes some of the mechanisms by which the industry has enclosed land and water in two of the countries most affected, Indonesia and Thailand, and outlines the various forms of opposition the industry is meeting. It concludes by indicating some of the strategies the industry is using to manage this resistance.

For the past 25 years, scientists have been developing a new class of birth control methods -- immuno-contraceptives, also known as an anti-fertility “vaccines” -- which aim to turn the body’s immune system against reproductive components. Immuno-contraceptives are likely to be unreliable as far as an individual is concerned and to entail an unprecedented potential for abuse; severe health risks cannot be discounted. They are a clear example of the impact “population control” has had on contraceptive research.

Many activists have an image of power as something which the state and industry “have” and others “lack” They often believe that only by entering the “real world” and getting some of this “power” can social movements have any real hope of achieving change. Yet there are diverse kinds of influence operating in today’s world; we could learn much about "power" from working more closely with those who historically have proved most effective in protecting the environment and who are most capable of becoming lasting allies.

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 decisive piece of evidence for the cosmetic nature of the World Bank's periodic claims to be reforming itself is that its staff are given no incentives to change their ways. The operative incentives for those who want to get anywhere at the Bank have always been to move lots of money, to find jobs for the boys, and to get and stay involved in lots of projects. This talk illustrates this predicament by referring to an "implementation review" of the Bank's forest policy.

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.

Disputes over a forestry master plan formulated for Thailand by Finnish consultants and others illustrate how environmental conflicts are often settled by translating concerns and suggestions in procedures acceptable to the more powerful.

“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.

Between 2002 and 2005, The Corner House and its partners conducted fact-finding missions to areas along the route of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline to gather information about community expectations and opinions, impacts, and the consultation and land expropriation process carried out by the BTC consortium (led by British oil multinational BP) building the pipeline.