Serious question: doesn’t that cut against the efficacy of corporate campaigns? How would an organization ever know if the company was respecting their promise?
Yeah, this is a big challenge in the corporate campaign space, especially in places with weak legal systems and low enforcement. But this links to why corporate campaigns can be more effective than policy campaigns. Getting policy commitments on paper in a country with poor rule of law might have very limited impact because no-one’s incentivised to uphold the laws, but there’s a decent chance that an international, or niche company with high reputational awareness is incentivised to try and maintain a higher welfare supply chain.
So you might get a high-end hotel chain in a lower-income country that genuinely wants to shift to cage-free eggs after a campaign. They make a commitment, you arrange meetings with them and their suppliers to help them meet these commitments, and track whether their numbers match up. This can work even if the legal system functions poorly.
People in the Bharat Initiative for Accountability (BIA) and Global Food Partners (GFP) are doing stuff like this in India and Southeast Asia. It takes loads of work on both the supply and demand side, as you might expect, which might cut against the higher-end effectiveness estimates, but it’s definitely something people have in mind.
People from these teams spoke about this recently on the How I Learned To Love Shrimp podcast (here and here).
I think the problem of entities lying about what they’re doing (especially in low trust regions) is wider than just corporate campaigns. Ultimately charities have to make some sort of decision on how and if to audit whether the outcomes they’re expecting are the ones they’re getting.
Asking whether Sinergia had any way to evaluate whether companies were complying (before or after their intervention) is I think the main reason that it would have been good for VettedCauses to share their initial findings before publication. Sinergia appear to have Brazilian staff focused on this specific issue so they shouldn’t have been ignorant of the relevant law, but it’s possible they intentionally targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant (this is the whole theory of change behind Legal Impact for Chickens) and had some success. It is also possible they targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant and simply believed what the companies said in response. It is also possible there are loopholes and exemptions in the law. But I’d still have to agree that taking 70% of the credit for campaigning against something already made illegal is a bold claim, and some of the other claims Sinergia made don’t seem justifiable either.
Hi David, thank you for taking the time to read our article. You make some interesting points.
In terms of the work Sinergia did to claim credit for helping millions of pigs, it is listed in Column W of this spreadsheet.
For example, in Cell W5: “After the impacts of Pigs in Focus rank 1st edition and dozen of meetings, Aurora published in 2023 the commitment to banning surgical castration in pigs. Alianima engaged positively with the company.”
Most of the descriptions are quite similar to this. Note that “Pigs in Focus” is an annual report that Sinergia began publishing in 2022.
Serious question: doesn’t that cut against the efficacy of corporate campaigns? How would an organization ever know if the company was respecting their promise?
Yeah, this is a big challenge in the corporate campaign space, especially in places with weak legal systems and low enforcement. But this links to why corporate campaigns can be more effective than policy campaigns. Getting policy commitments on paper in a country with poor rule of law might have very limited impact because no-one’s incentivised to uphold the laws, but there’s a decent chance that an international, or niche company with high reputational awareness is incentivised to try and maintain a higher welfare supply chain.
So you might get a high-end hotel chain in a lower-income country that genuinely wants to shift to cage-free eggs after a campaign. They make a commitment, you arrange meetings with them and their suppliers to help them meet these commitments, and track whether their numbers match up. This can work even if the legal system functions poorly.
People in the Bharat Initiative for Accountability (BIA) and Global Food Partners (GFP) are doing stuff like this in India and Southeast Asia. It takes loads of work on both the supply and demand side, as you might expect, which might cut against the higher-end effectiveness estimates, but it’s definitely something people have in mind.
People from these teams spoke about this recently on the How I Learned To Love Shrimp podcast (here and here).
I think the problem of entities lying about what they’re doing (especially in low trust regions) is wider than just corporate campaigns. Ultimately charities have to make some sort of decision on how and if to audit whether the outcomes they’re expecting are the ones they’re getting.
Asking whether Sinergia had any way to evaluate whether companies were complying (before or after their intervention) is I think the main reason that it would have been good for VettedCauses to share their initial findings before publication. Sinergia appear to have Brazilian staff focused on this specific issue so they shouldn’t have been ignorant of the relevant law, but it’s possible they intentionally targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant (this is the whole theory of change behind Legal Impact for Chickens) and had some success. It is also possible they targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant and simply believed what the companies said in response. It is also possible there are loopholes and exemptions in the law. But I’d still have to agree that taking 70% of the credit for campaigning against something already made illegal is a bold claim, and some of the other claims Sinergia made don’t seem justifiable either.
Hi David, thank you for taking the time to read our article. You make some interesting points.
In terms of the work Sinergia did to claim credit for helping millions of pigs, it is listed in Column W of this spreadsheet.
For example, in Cell W5: “After the impacts of Pigs in Focus rank 1st edition and dozen of meetings, Aurora published in 2023 the commitment to banning surgical castration in pigs. Alianima engaged positively with the company.”
Most of the descriptions are quite similar to this. Note that “Pigs in Focus” is an annual report that Sinergia began publishing in 2022.