Editor’s Note: In June 2016, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society hosted its third Junior Scholars Forum. The following article covers a not-yet-published research paper presented there. To learn more about the research, readers can contact the paper’s author, Yves Plourde ([email protected]).
(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
Greenpeace is unusual in that it really goes [after] big, global problems,” says Yves Plourde, an assistant professor of international business at HEC Montreal. “It also does so in a very unconventional manner. Not all organizations have Greenpeace’s ambition to address global problems, but all organizations face problems that are big relative to their size. The key is to do more with [available] resources.”
Plourde examined the history of Greenpeace from 1986 to 2001, a period when the environmental advocacy group underwent significant shifts both in how it operated and in how it performed. As part of his research, he identified major Greenpeace victories—the signing of an international environmental agreement, for example, or a change in the practices of one or more multinational corporations. He then analyzed these victories in relation to the way that Greenpeace organized its activities, allocated its resources, and decided on which projects to pursue. He studied meeting minutes, internal reports, and correspondence between decision makers, among other sources, and looked for factors that accounted for variations in Greenpeace’s ability to achieve major victories over the period of his study.
By 2001, Greenpeace was pursuing more “big wins” (as Plourde calls them) than at any other period in its history. Plourde attributes this development partly to the organization’s efforts to scale up “small wins.” Starting in the mid- 1990s, he discovered, Greenpeace adjusted its strategy for managing global advocacy work. Instead of creating coordinated international campaigns, it began to support small-scale actions that fell within a general issue area—actions that it could replicate later in other locations. In the late 1990s, for example, Greenpeace succeeded in changing legislation regarding GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in Austria, Luxembourg, and a handful of other countries. The organization then built on that experience to obtain changes in GMO policy elsewhere in Europe.
For this approach to work, Plourde explains, Greenpeace had to change how it operated internally. Previously, it had followed a top-down approach, in which its international secretariat (Greenpeace International) not only set strategic objectives for the whole organization but also decided on specific tactics that all of its national and regional organizations (NROs) would use. During the 1990s, however, Greenpeace began to allow NROs to develop and implement their own tactics. In other words, according to Plourde, the organization “lowered” its “center of attention.” As a result of this shift, people in NROs could learn what worked or didn’t work in a local context, and they could more easily communicate and collaborate with colleagues at the NRO level.
Other scholars agree with Plourde’s conclusion that solutions to large-scale social problems work best when they start small. “As with the ‘butterfly effect,’ small changes can make a big difference,” says Tima Bansal, professor of general management and director of the Centre for Building Sustainable Value at Ivey Business School. That effect “matters especially in social problems,” she adds. “The very notion of ‘social’ implies interconnections among people.” And those connections necessarily happen at a small scale.
Small wins, of course, don’t automatically translate into large-scale change. Bansal notes that butterfly-effect change is nonlinear, and no one can predict what its ultimate impact will be. In addition, she argues, even a small win has to involve an issue—GMO regulation, for instance— that people care about.
Plourde offers advice to organizations that seek to emulate the kind of success that Greenpeace achieved in the late 20th century. They should, he suggests, give decision-making capability to people who are closest to the front lines of an issue area. Equally important is a general willingness to adapt. “Any organization can try to change its structure or its strategy, but one of Greenpeace’s strengths is that [its people] have always questioned themselves,” Plourde says. “To implement positive strategic change, an organization needs to be open to self-criticism and to learning from not only its successes but also its weaknesses.”
Yves Plourde, “Organizing to Address Large-Scale Social Problems: The Case of Greenpeace (1986-2001),” 2016.
Read more stories by Corey Binns.