{"id":779,"date":"2011-02-11T22:52:45","date_gmt":"2011-02-12T02:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/?p=779"},"modified":"2011-02-11T22:52:45","modified_gmt":"2011-02-12T02:52:45","slug":"corporate-investment-in-a-community-csr-that-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/corporate-investment-in-a-community-csr-that-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Corporate Investment in a Community: CSR That Works"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post\u00a0comes from the island of Luzon, in the Philippines, where a team from the Corporate Social Responsibility Project<\/a> of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has worked on a film documenting the tensions between operators of two hydroelectric dams and the communities that were inundated, destroyed and displaced during the construction of the dams.<\/p>\n

One company ignored the communities and the other engaged them, and the difference is so palpable that you wonder why any company would ever do anything other than engagement.<\/p>\n

In the mid-1950s, the government-owned National Power Corporation <\/a>(NPC) constructed two\u00a0dams in the province of Benguet<\/a>, about 275 km north of Manila.\u00a0 These were the first hydroelectric plants in the Philippines, and supplied the\u00a0needs of the Manila Power Grid.\u00a0 The dams were sited in two small villages, or barangays:\u00a0 Ambuklao<\/a> and Binga<\/a>.\u00a0 NPC promised that the residents of these valleys — soon to become reservoirs — would be relocated and compensated.\u00a0 However, their homes of generations were lost; the graves of their revered ancestors were disturbed or flooded; and the basis for their agrarian culture was destroyed.\u00a0 The residents were angry with NPC and sustained that anger for over fifty years.<\/p>\n

In 2008 the dams were privatized by sale to SN Aboitiz<\/a>.\u00a0 One of Aboitiz’ first moves was to drive the six hours or so from Manila to Benguet, meet with the residents in their barangay halls, eat tilapia and rice with them, and explain their intentions to rehabilitate the dams and assist the community while doing so.\u00a0 Some senior Aboitiz executives were shocked and dismayed to be greeted with skepticism and, in some cases, uncharacteristically overt hostility.\u00a0 They heard elders accuse them of mouthing the same “sweet words” by which NPC had betrayed their fathers and mothers.\u00a0 Some wept expressing the heartbreak at the loss of their rice fields, their churches\u00a0and their schools.\u00a0 One related the story that his mother had told him, about being removed from their home one morning by government agents and then watching\u00a0it be destroyed by bulldozers.<\/p>\n

Some residents took the privatization as an opportunity to seek redress for these old injuries, and wrote to the Office of Compliance Advisor Ombudsman <\/a>(CAO) of the International Finance Corporation (which was funding the rehabilitation project), asking that funds be withheld until these matters were finally resolved to the satisfaction of the indigenous people.\u00a0 The CAO engaged the services of a Manila-based ADR organization, CoRe<\/a>, and conducted an assessment of the problem.\u00a0 Professor Annabelle Tecson-Abaya<\/a> of CoRe then worked to identify ten stakeholders — companies, community groups and political entities — and conducted an intense\u00a0five-day workshop involving three representatives of each.<\/p>\n

The stories of the workshop are eye-opening.\u00a0 At the beginning of the week participants seldom spoke to each other and, in one instance, openly accused each other of insensitivity and callousness.\u00a0 By Friday morning, by contrast,\u00a0all 30 participants conspired to arrive together, ten minutes late, and formed a conga line to enter the workshop space.\u00a0 To this day they stay in touch with each other and lines of communication are not just open — they are personal.<\/p>\n

At the end of this negotiation “capacity-building” workshop, the barangay leaders understood the principles of collaborative negotiation, and the representatives of SN Aboitiz knew they had a team of partners.\u00a0 Sub-teams worked on issues:\u00a0 If the reservoirs could not be drained, could a cultural heritage site nevertheless be constructed so that the children of the barangays could understand who they are?\u00a0 If the surrounding land could not be sold to the residents, could they not nevertheless have the right to operate it for community purposes?\u00a0 If the agrarian traditions could not be continued, could not funds be available to improve roads, develop clinics, and invest in sustainable environmental practices and encourage tourism?<\/p>\n

In May 2009 all stakeholders entered into a Memorandum of Agreement <\/a>undertaking to pursue these and other creative ideas.\u00a0 Now that the dams are no longer tax-exempt government assets, the Governor of Benguet reports that 5,000,000 pesos come into the province revenues each year.\u00a0 The Binga\/Tinongdan barangay receives over 1,000,000 pesos a year from Aboitiz’ corporate social responsibility fund<\/a>, and requests for the fund are received by the designated CSR liaison to the barangay — the son whose mother told him of the loss of their home to an NPC bulldozer.<\/p>\n

And SN Aboitiz?\u00a0 CEO Emmanuel Rubio said it makes perfect sense to him, to his joint venturers, and to his parent company.\u00a0 They are in the business of creating electrical power.\u00a0 They are therefore in a community for the long term, he explained, and are taxpaying citizens of that community.\u00a0 Their employees come from that community.\u00a0 The proposal that they should not invest in the community makes no sense to him.\u00a0 As part of the SN Power Group’s<\/a> business strategy, he explained, they try their best to be transparent, to communicate their intentions to the people who are affected by them, and to work in partnership with all their stakeholders — including the people they work among and their governments.<\/p>\n

When the team left Binga on Thursday afternoon, the barangay was pounding red rice and engaging in the ritual slaughtering of a pig in preparation for its annual cultural festival — the costs of which, this year, are being partially underwritten by SN Aboitiz.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Learning the values of the indigenous people of the Iowak and Ibaloy<\/a> took some time.\u00a0 Learning what they valued and what they needed took even longer.\u00a0 And things are not perfect — nor will they ever be.\u00a0 But as problems arise, now channels are well established to address them, rather than bulldozing them into the ground.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A power company demonstrates that investing in the communities in which it operates makes good business sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13,37],"tags":[10,17,12,31],"class_list":["post-779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conflict-resolution","category-international","category-negotiation","tag-conflict-management","tag-corporate-social-responsibility","tag-culture","tag-negotiation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.businessconflictmanagement.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}