Ronie Garcia-Johnson’s scientific contributions

The value chain of coffee, the world’s second most valuable commodity after oil, differs markedly between the production side and the final consumption side. At the supply end — in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America — we find story after story of human exploitation and repression. When colonial powers first disseminated coffee around the globe, they also sent along slaves and indentured immigrants. People who were not forcibly or illegally removed from the land where coffee was eventually planted remained, often indebted, to cultivate a cash crop in an uncertain market instead of traditional subsistence plants and trees; this cultivation subsequently devastated the eco-systems upon which people depended, through deforestation, depletion and pesticide use. When children have not worked alongside men and women to plant, harvest and process coffee, they have suffered from poor living conditions, hunger and malnutrition, with little hope of gaining an education.

A great deal of research has focused on the role of governments, nongovernmental organizations, and advocacy groups in promoting environmental ideologies. Researchers and activists have generally assumed antienvironmental and antiregulatory stances on the part of corporations. Exporting Environmentalism is the first book to examine industry's transnational promotion of environmental ideas and practices. The book also challenges and complements other theoretical approaches to the study of international environmental politics. Rather than positing change in national and international environmental policy as the only valuable outcome, it looks at the environmental benefits of changes in perspectives, policies, and practices within the firms themselves.Ronie Garcia-Johnson shows that multinational corporations have incentives to raise the environmental, health, and safety standards of domestic companies in their host countries to maintain their competitive advantage. To determine industry's exportation and importation of environmentalism, Garcia-Johnson focuses on the flow of ideas, values, and strategies from United States-based chemical companies to companies in Mexico and Brazil. The comparative case study explains how and why Mexican and Brazilian companies are importing environmental ideas and changing their production policies. Garcia-Johnson then explores the effects of these private policies on communities, nongovernmental organizations, governments, and national environmental politics within Brazil and Mexico.

A new global activism is shaming the world's top companies into enacting codes of conduct and opening their Third World factories for inspection. But before you run a victory lap in your new sweatshop-free sneakers, ask yourself: Do these voluntary arrangements truly help workers and the environment, or do they merely weaken local governments while adding more green to the corporate bottom line?

A great deal of research has focused on the role of governments, nongovernmental organizations, and advocacy groups in promoting environmental ideologies. Researchers and activists have generally assumed antienvironmental and antiregulatory stances on the part of corporations. Exporting Environmentalism is the first book to examine industry's transnational promotion of environmental ideas and practices. The book also challenges and complements other theoretical approaches to the study of international environmental politics. Rather than positing change in national and international environmental policy as the only valuable outcome, it looks at the environmental benefits of changes in perspectives, policies, and practices within the firms themselves. Ronie Garcia-Johnson shows that multinational corporations have incentives to raise the environmental, health, and safety standards of domestic companies in their host countries to maintain their competitive advantage. To determine industry's exportation and importation of environmentalism, Garcia-Johnson focuses on the flow of ideas, values, and strategies from United States-based chemical companies to companies in Mexico and Brazil. The comparative case study explains how and why Mexican and Brazilian companies are importing environmental ideas and changing their production policies. Garcia-Johnson then explores the effects of these private policies on communities, nongovernmental organizations, governments, and national environmental politics within Brazil and Mexico.

Assuming that transnational actors from industrialized states have disseminated versions of environmental ideology (sets of ideas and values) to domestic organizations in industrializing states, I develop propositions about this dissemination and industrial producers. I examine these propositions with an embedded case study of the U.S. chemical industry and a comparative case study of the chemical industries of Brazil and Mexico. As the dependent variables in this work are not international or national government environmental policies, but the worldviews and practices of industrial producers, this work differs from many studies of international environmental politics. The focus on profit-seeking multinational corporations (MNCs) in this work complements International Relations studies of epistemic communities, transnational issue networks, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). After anti-toxics environmentalism, supplemented with legal activity, forced the chemical industry in the United States to adopt a new approach in their operations inside and outside the U.S. in the late 1980s, some U.S.-based multinational corporations exported voluntarist environmentalism to industry associations and chemical companies around the world to protect the legitimacy of the global chemical industry, to pre-empt stringent legislation at all levels, to level the playing field, and to streamline their own operations. Given material conditions, ideology was accepted rationally and willingly by firms in the chemical industries of Brazil and Mexico, in advance of strong domestic anti-toxics movements. Voluntarist environmentalism provides Brazilian and Mexican producers with the potential to maintain comfortable relations with government, and perhaps, to pre-empt serious anti-toxics movements. Evidence gathered from secondary sources in the United States and interviews conducted in Brazil and Mexico in 1996 and 1997 partially supports the proposition that the exportation of ideology by civil society actors is more probable with open trade, and importation by civil society actors is more probable in a state dependent for trade on another. Although the efforts of non-profit organizations have been instrumental in this process of ideological exportation and importation, the proposition that environmental worldviews spread by MNCs may be more influential in directly revising the substance of ideas and values held by industrial producers than foreign governments, NGOs, or international governmental organizations, is tentatively supported.

The environmental practices of multinational corporations (MNCs) present challenges and opportunities for policymakers. One multinational corporation alone may have dozens of subsidiaries in major manufacturing centers around the world, all beyond the jurisdiction of its home country. While many multinational corporations are publicly reporting standard environmental management practices throughout their global operations, it is difficult to verify their claims. Subsidiaries may not implement practices as thoroughly as possible. They may also shift the burden of highly polluting processes to host country firms. On the other hand, MNC subsidiaries that seriously implement environmental management practices are in an ideal position to share these practices with partners, suppliers, customers, and even regulators. Drawing upon research conducted in Brazil and the United States, this paper describes and evaluates a transnational alliance of policymakers--a "transgovernmental" effort--that developed between U.S. EPA Region 1 and the environmental protection agency in the state of São Paulo, Brazil (CETESB), to meet the challenge posed by MNC voluntarism. Together, U.S. and Brazilian innovators created a pilot program: the International Partnership for Pollution Prevention (IP3, or PREVENIR in Brazil). Established with a non- binding agreement in September, 1997, and funded by the Brazilians and the companies involved (3M and AMP), PREVENIR brought environmental agencies from MNC home and host countries together to encourage, guide, and reward voluntary pollution prevention efforts. As it included subsidiary suppliers, the program enabled smaller domestic firms to implement pollution prevention practices, and greened the supply chain. The IP3/PREVENIR pilot program provides a model for cooperation as environmental policymakers confront the challenges of increasing global trade and direct foreign investment. Such transgovernmental forms of governance may supplement multilateral efforts to mitigate global change. The evaluation of the pilot program described in this paper offers lessons for those policymakers, MNCs, and multilateral organizations interested in replicating the model.