The article below describes how corporations use community advisory panels
to gain community acceptance for pollution.  Government agencies and
corporations have accessibility committees that are used as a defense
when they are challenged for disability discrimination.  This article is
from the newsletter PR Watch.

kelly

URL: http://www.prwatch.org/99-Q1/caps.html

               Community Advisory Panels: Corporate Cat Herding

   by Bob Burton

   Following the disaster at Union Carbide's Bhopal plant in India, the
   credibility of the chemical industry in the US was in tatters. Peter
   Sandman suggested to Ben Woodhouse, then Vice President and Director
   of Global Issues for Dow Chemical, that the industry needed to create
   mechanisms to rebuild trust.

   In Canada the chemical industry had developed a Responsible Care code
   in 1985. The CEOs of Dow Chemical and Union Carbide encouraged the
   adoption in the US of a similar code. A committee of three industry
   executives, including Woodhouse, was established to develop the
   Responsible Care code including the expansion of Community Advisory
   Panels (CAP's) beyond the two in existence in the chemical industry at
   the time.

   Sandman played a critical role in persuading the Chemical
   Manufacturers Association (CMA) to adopt the code. Responsible Care,
   he says candidly, "aims to build credibility for the beleaguered
   chemical industry in part by sharing control with critics and
   neighbours." A central part of this strategy has been the
   establishment of some 375 CAPs in the United States.

   For Woodhouse, who resigned from Dow in 1997 and is now a PR
   consultant based in Australia, CAPs are a way of "handing over some
   control or feeling of power to the community because if you do that
   the community gives it back to you in spades." More importantly for
   the company, effective CAPs help protect a company's "license to
   operate."

   Although companies sometimes fear letting outsiders get involved in
   making decisions that affect their business, Sandman says, "The usual
   problem with these committees isn't orchestrating the chaos. It is
   sustaining interest and attendance. Erstwhile troublemakers let onto
   the panel start learning about the industry's problems and
   limitations, acquire a sense of responsibility to give good advice,
   and pretty soon they are sounding a lot like industry apologists. This
   is not hypocrisy or co-optation: it is outrage reduction."

   According to Woodhouse, a critical step in developing a CAP is
   selecting the "core members for your team."

   "Find three to four people from the community who want to work with
   you to make you successful," Woodhouse says. "Use that core of members
   to draft the terms of agreement and to recruit the members. . . . In
   every panel we put together we'd select the first three people and
   we'd let them tell us who the rest of the membership should be and
   then we said fine, go out and sell your idea and it became their
   panel, not our panel," he says.

   Woodhouse insists that CAPs are not greenwash. "This is nothing about
   public relations, no greenwash here, you've got to walk the talk. You
   have to listen, discuss and then act," he told the Minerals Council of
   Australia's Annual Environmental Workshop.

   "How should companies deal with 'tricky' people on the panel?" asked
   one workshop participant.

   "That is why the selection of your core members is so important,"
   Woodhouse said. "You pick three or four people that on a bell shaped
   curve tend to be right here in the middle. Then you ask them to help
   you find people that not only fit with the middle of that bell curve
   but represent both ends. What happens is that that middle part kind of
   keeps the two end parts from getting too radical on you. About the
   time they start going off in some direction that seems too weird or
   unbelievable, you'll find the rest of the panel will bring them back
   in. It's not quite as bad as trying to herd cats. It's a little bit
   easier than that" he told the audience.

   Stephen Lester, Science Director for the Center for Health,
   Environment and Justice (formerly the Citizens Clearinghouse on
   Hazardous Waste), says experience with the usefulness of CAPs is
   mixed. CAPs formed to deal with cleanups such as Superfund sites have
   "sometimes worked out quite well, but other times they are a disaster
   from the community's perspective," he says. "When they don't work
   well, there is co-optation, distraction and diffusion of community
   efforts. From the government/industry perspective, the idea is to
   bottle up the activists with meetings and issues that are secondary,
   at best, to the community's interests and objectives."

   Often the composition of the panel--the "bell curve" that Woodhouse
   seeks to establish--is central to its failure to deal with activist
   concerns. "The problem is that the industry/business/public officials
   perspective is "balanced" against one or two community people who are
   overwhelmed, out-voiced and out-voted," Lester says. "When it comes to
   CAPs covering operating plants, the company really does not want to
   share the information with the community and is scared of what they
   will do with information they give them."

   "CAP members," Sandman says, "tend to learn more about company
   perspective's and problems than about critics' views." Participation
   in CAPs also generates a social pressure on all participants to
   conform. "The experience of breaking bread with company
   representatives, chatting with them before and after meetings . . .
   encourages many CAP members to feel that harsh criticism would be
   somehow rude. CAP members who don't respond this way are likely to
   feel some social pressure from their fellow members to conform or
   quit."

   However, participation in Responsible Care has not imposed similar
   inhibitions on the chemical industry, which continues to sponsor
   anti-environmental advocacy programs. "Just because we have
   Responsible Care doesn't mean that we are going to roll over. If we
   think that there is inappropriate legislation or regulation coming
   down, we have got an obligation as an industry to tell the policy
   makers about that," Woodhouse says.

   Woodhouse rejects criticisms of the chemical industry's opposition to
   the Clean Air Act of 1990 as proof the industry "doesn't walk the
   talk." "Nobody said just because we are trying to do the right thing
   we have to be stupid," he says.
   _________________________________________________________________

Photo caption:
 Former Dow Chemical vice president Peter Woodhouse explained
   how Community Action Panels can be used to win community support at
   the Australian mining industry's environmental conference in October
   1998.


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