Greenpeace: Case Study of an NGO Multinational Enterprise

Abstract

The global triad composed of governments, corporations and non- governmental organisations (NGOs), as discussed in the previous chapter, relies for much of its strength and innovation on NGOs such as Greenpeace, World Wide Fund, Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth which have become international non-profit businesses. Indeed they have become million-dollar, sophisticated, multinational operations which engage in research, political lobbying, effective media communication and activist policies on behalf of the environ- ment.2 Two of the newer organisations, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, founded as ‘lunatic’ fringe groups by environmental acti- vists in the 1970s, had by the end of the 1990s become major actors in their own right, both as non-governmental organisations granted observer status by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations and as international enterprises with global reach. So success- ful were they at their debut in the development of international environmental policy at the UN Rio de Janeiro Environment and Development Summit in 1992, that they led a group of leading envir- onmental NGOs in the conference negotiations.3 As noted in the previous chapter, the international NGOs have played a significant role in shaping the emerging global environmental agenda and none more so than the most widely recognised NGO, Greenpeace.