Companies should form networks, instead of playing alphabet soup, says Roberto Waack

A group of 181 representatives from the private, public, academia and civil society sectors met via Zoom on the afternoon of February 14 to discuss strategies to put the Amazon on the agenda in this year’s elections.

Members of the Uma Concertação pela Amazônia initiative, a non-partisan dialogue network with more than 500 members, they spoke of the need to bring the issue closer to voters, elect governors and parliamentarians “who have the Amazon as a country’s vision” and prepare a plan for action for the first 100 days of the next president, to be presented to the transitional government.

One of the hosts of the meeting was biologist Roberto Waack, co-founder of the initiative and chairman of the board of Instituto Arapyaú, a private foundation that invests in sustainable development projects in the Amazon and southern Bahia.

With a trajectory as an executive and advisor in companies and NGOs, Waack has been engaged in the construction of networks — spaces for dialogue that unite organizations and leaders from different sectors in the construction of solutions to complex sustainability issues.

For him, it is participation in networks, and not the so-called ESG (environmental, social and governance) agenda, which will enable companies to face the challenges that surround them.

“Either companies establish a deep relationship with society, or they will continue to play alphabet soup with their ESG departments.”

Does ESG represent a breakthrough for companies or is there more noise than action? There is, yes, progress, but slow, because companies do not live well with drastic changes. For four decades these subjects have come and gone, each time with an outfit.

ESG has incorporated the governance dimension and that is important. Members of boards of directors now need to build a repertoire that for them has always been marginal. But the central question ends up being avoided.

What is the central issue? Society is stronger and has an increasing voice over what happens in companies. A more forceful, more educated voice.

Companies still want to have control of everything that concerns them, but this is increasingly fragile. The license to operate is more complicated, reputational issues more complex.

Any industry today is affected by a heterogeneous set of themes and characters, and companies don’t know what to do, try to simplify and limit the discussion to ESG.

But, either companies establish a deep relationship with society, or they will continue to play alphabet soup with their ESG departments, far from what the business models of the future will demand.

You propose that companies deal with what you call indomitable problems. Can you explain? The theory of “wicked problems” emerged in the 1970s in California to deal primarily with social issues. Today we can call those that emerge from this relationship between companies and society as indomitable problems, for which there is no black and white answer.

These are problems that companies cannot manage, measure, and often cannot even clearly formulate.

Is the controversy involving Bradesco and ranchers an example? Yes. Bradesco invited bloggers to promote its product and they suggested, in a bank video, that people reduce their meat consumption. Many people thought: cool, Bradesco is in tune with what part of the population is looking for.
But some ranchers thought it was absurd and went to barbecue in front of the agencies. The bank backed off. It turns out that both views exist. It is necessary to live with them. It is not a matter of opting for one side, but of finding paths that contemplate the multiplicity of visions.

What kind of indomitable problems do you see in the companies you follow? Consider the animal protein sector. There are consumers who want to eat meat and those who don’t. Among those who do not want to, there are those who think it is contaminated with antibiotics. Or who are concerned about the health effects. There are also those who do not want to consume anything that comes from areas of deforestation or who think it is absurd to kill a calf.

When a consumer enters a McDonald’s or Burger King, the hamburger offered there has these questions embedded.

A food manufacturer has to consider all this and deal with the different forces in society. Including the NGO that says it doesn’t like the product, but that monitors what the company does and distributes this information, including to those who finance the business.

This is being discussed at Marfrig, where you are a counselor? It is. Banks and investors are now asking companies to clean up their supply chains, which means making them environmentally responsible. Marfrig has 300,000 small producers among its suppliers. It could decide: we are going to remove from our chain those who are related to deforestation.

Would that help clean up the supply chain? Yes. Would it solve the deforestation problem? No. And what’s worse: it would throw part of those small producers into illegality.

How to resolve the issue? There is no off-the-shelf solution. It is necessary to accept that there are producers with problems and find solutions.

You suggest that companies share dilemmas with others. How? Participating in networks, spaces of a powerful collective intelligence.

When a company participates in networks, it is able to do a much more sophisticated reading of the context.

Vale, for example, cannot solve the issue of mining in indigenous areas alone, but it can have organizations that deal with indigenous issues, which deal with topics such as biodiversity or the Manaus Free Zone. They are inevitable for a company of this size that places itself in the Amazon.

Has Arapyaú sought to bring more companies to the networks in which it participates? Yes. In 2015 the institute was one of the articulators of the Brazil, Climate, Forests and Agriculture Coalition. It brought together companies from agribusiness, the forestry sector and environmentalists at a time of great polarization, and it was possible to unite these actors in the construction of shared proposals.

When the Concertation for the Amazon was created in 2000, we knew that it would not make sense to discuss only in civil society. Civil society handles tens of millions of dollars a year. The private sector handles tens of billions. The transformation capacity is much greater.

Is it possible to build consensus in networks? We don’t talk about consensus. We talk about consent.
In Concertação we have to deal with many elephants in the room. An example is deforestation. Some defend legal deforestation, the one allowed by the Forest Code. Others, zero net deforestation, that is, not cutting down anything, even if the law allows it.

But there is one aspect that everyone agrees on: illegal deforestation is unacceptable. In this we got a consent.

When you manage to sculpt the first elephant, you create a relationship of trust between everyone. We learned that it is possible to produce something even with opponents.

What was the biggest damage of the Bolsonaro administration to the environmental theme?There is a setback from the destruction of structures — of command and control, of design, of planning. It will take a long time for everything to be rebuilt.

There is also the very important damage of real deforestation, of the effective loss of natural heritage, irreparable.

And there is a third damage, which is the proliferation of lawlessness and the growth of violence. The speed with which crime has grown in the Amazon is impressive. The connection between drug trafficking and illegal mining, illegal deforestation, the conquest of land.

And that will contaminate the electoral process, finance campaigns and legitimize the permanence of this terrible situation.

Is it really possible to debate the Amazon in this year’s elections?Certainly. The Amazon will be among the five main themes in the electoral discussion.

We learned that it is possible to discuss topics that go beyond polarization. Let’s, yes, put the Amazon on the agenda.