JohnElkinton.com - timelines

Downwave 2 (1992-1998)

Downwave 2 set in shortly before the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Several people from SustainAbility went to the Summit: Julia Hailes, Dr Vernon Jennings and Geoff Lye (though Geoff, then at Countrywide Communications, wouldn't join formally us until 1995). I, instead, went to Yokohama and Tokyo. The Summit set some useful benchmarks in terms of climate change and biodiversity, but once again the political steam was bleeding out of the system.

Many of our old activities continued in this period. I continued to edit Biotechnology Bulletin, albeit now spending just one weekend a month on the task. Julia and I continued to write books together, including Manual 2000 (1998) and The New Foods Guide (1999). Such projects involved extended working stints with Julia at her family home, Tintinhull House, Somerset, owned by the National Trust.

SustainAbility continued to evolve. Geoff Lye had joined as a director, and some time later two early directors moved on: Julia Hailes to have children and work independently from Somerset (she remains a member of SustainAbility's Council) and Dr Vernon Jennings (also now a SustainAbility Council member and, until recently, a vice-president at Novo Nordisk).

SustainAbility moved from auditing to reporting, publishing a series of reports that helped define the international corporate reporting agenda. The work has been undertaken in close partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and a range of other organisations. A key publication, laying the foundations for much of what followed, was Coming Clean, developed with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu International (DTTI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), and published in 1993. This project alliance came about because of a conversation with our next-door neighbour, South African Eggie Koch, who worked for DTTI.

The next quantum jump came with Engaging Stakeholders, published in 1996, in which I, Andrea Spencer-Cooke and other colleagues map out the emerging reporting and stakeholder engagement agendas.

Andrea was also instrumental in my development of the triple bottom line concept, a phrase I coined in 1994. The idea was that business created - or destroyed - economic, social and environmental value. My first publication on the theme appeared in The California Management Review in 1994, with Engaging Stakeholders sketching in more of the detail in 1996. But the full account of the triple bottom line concept and agenda would appear the following year, 1997, in the form of Cannibals with Forks. The book, which was short-listed for the Financial Times/Booz-Allen Hamilton Best Business Book Award, had an extraordinary impact.

Building on work we had done during early phases of our development, we got involved in a huge number of stakeholder engagement processes, often facilitating them, sometimes participating as stakeholders.

In the same way that our relationship with Novo Nordisk was a defining one for us in the early 1990s, our relationship with Shell was the defining one in the late 1990s. Following the Brent Spar and Nigeria crises of 1995, we had refused to work for Shell for two years, despite top-level requests to do so. When we finally did engage, we helped on many fronts - including the development of The Shell Report, an annual series of sustainable development reports - and remain involved today.

To ensure we kept up to date with NGO issues and concerns, we carried out a series of NGO surveys during this period. These began with The Green Wave (1990), then moved on to The Corporate Environmentalists (1991), The Green Keiretsu (1994) and, probably the most influential of the lot, Strange Attractor - which I wrote with Shelly Fennell in 1996. The work was originally commissioned for the board of BP, which then allowed us to publish it. This strand of our work continues into the third downwave period, with our work on 'The 21st Century NGO' (2002-2003).