NGO campaign responses to corporate environmental policies and practices

Abstract

This paper analyses how (i) corporate environmental policies and (ii) actual corporate environmental practices (carbon dioxide emissions) affect the number of negative campaigns corporations face from non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). The corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature suggests that CSR activities can provide reputational insurance against negative NGO attention but also come with reputational risk; we use theory and insights from the NGO literature to posit that these relationships are complex and context‐dependent. Consistent with this, our empirical analysis shows that corporate environmental policies and practices have different impacts on NGO campaigns; while the number of campaigns rises with improvements in policy, it also rises with increases in emissions. In other words, NGOs target companies that are big on words and/or bad in practice, suggesting that investing in CSR policy alone may be counterproductive in deflecting NGO attention. Finally, NGO strategies depend on their power and home country context, making nuanced analysis of their responses to CSR activities crucial.