Turkey’s NGOs and business associations are in the challenging process of convincing businesses of the risks and opportunities of sustainability
A quest by engineer Sibel Bulay to bring sustainable transport to Turkey is an apt analogy for the current challenges of many of the country’s responsibility-focused NGOs and business associations. While opportunities abound, there are also growing pains.
Until recently, businesses’ charitable and philanthropic activities were moulded by the historical “waqf” structure. Proper corporate responsibility requires a more comprehensive view, however, and so organisations have the challenge of both growing stakeholder engagement in a society that has had limited activist involvement, and increasing corporate involvement in order to press forward with a sustainability agenda.
Turkey’s fairly steady macroeconomic growth beginning in 2002, and the subsequent coming of age of a powerful group of Turkish entrepreneurs spurred the first wave of sustainability-related NGOs and business associations. Successful, civic-minded leaders such as Hayrettin Karaca and Nihat Gökyigitfounded Tema (Turkish Foundation for Combating Soil Erosion) and retired bank chief Ibrahim Bertil started Tog (Community Volunteer Foundation).
Tog, for example, has had success at raising awareness among the Turkish public about renewable energy, especially in the youth population (aged 17-25). For example, the Solar Generation project now at seven universities is getting students to look for renewable projects on campuses and advocate for policy change to their administrations.
Tema has a high profile with the public and has made inroads inside companies. The “81 Forests in 81 Cities” campaign helped bring the plight of Turkey’s forests to the attention of regular Turkish citizens. In partnership with Tema, Is Bankasi decided internally to shift funds it would normally use to send favoured customers New Year’s gifts and instead allocate them and other cash ($6.5m in total) to the planting of 2m trees. Nearly a million are already in the ground, planted by Tema volunteers, including elementary school children, at 81 urban locations.
Cultural resistance
However, meatier responsibility-centric NGOs frequently run into the cultural resistance of Turkish companies to see beyond simple philanthropy to actual opportunities and risks of embracing a broader sustainability agenda. As Serdar Dinler, president of the CSR Association of Turkey, has put it, 80% of companies see philanthropy as synonymous with corporate responsibility, leaving NGOs with an enormous, even overwhelming educational task.
Bulay’s organisation, Sum Türkiye, has encountered these challenges. Bulay, a former Ford product development engineer passionate about mobility, was sponsored by the World Resource Institute’s Embarq network to start her organisation.
She dived into the country’s snarly transport issues – in Istanbul, for example, most working men and women commute for two hours or more in crawling traffic and smoggy air conditions.
Sum Türkiye started by working on an emissions inventory of road-based traffic with BP. Bulay soon realised, however, that Sum Türkiye’s fundraising opportunities were limited, due to Turkey’s restricting NGO laws. Thus a significant portion of her working hours recently have been spent setting up a foundation and changing the organisation name to Embarq Turkey.
Now, Bulay’s new Embarq Turkey must embrace a partnership model for success.
There are two reasons for this. The influence from European and US multinationals’ sustainability approach is only just now spilling over to Turkish domestic corporations, making them not primed for joint projects just yet.
In addition, as Guvenc Engin, executive director of the Turkish BCSD notes, a critical, in-your-face approach, favoured by many existing Turkish NGOs (she mentions Greenpeace) is not going to be fruitful for corporate responsibility and sustainability issues.
“Few NGOs have the understanding of sustainability to pressure companies – many were established years ago and work with a business-as-usual approach – and to criticise companies is the main attraction. Greenpeace can do this, but other local NGOs can be more successful by taking the more constructive approach,” Engin says.
Bulay clearly knows this, and favours a constructive approach for Embarq Turkey.
Yet as far as domestic corporations are concerned, education about corporate responsibility is still lacking, Bulay says, and with Embarq the sole NGO specifically concentrating on sustainable mobility, it is beyond her organisation’s capacity.
Embarq is unlikely to grab any flashy headlines or prizes, as Is Bankasi has with “81 Cities”. Instead, Bulay says she must work to gain the trust of stakeholders, now and in the future. That way, she says, “when companies are ready to invest their CSR dollars, we can align their objectives with CSR initiatives”.
Embarq Turkey has partnered with the city of Sakarya’s Transport Directorate, as well as the Dutch NGO Interface for Cycling Expertise (I-CE), to train a local team to design safe bicycle corridors in this mid-sized city. Over 90% of Sakarya’s cyclists are male – unsafe conditions are seen as a barrier to women riders – and at least 10% of riders have been in collisions.
Bulay sees the greatest success in Sakarya thus far as the Transport Directorate’s realisation that cycling is actually a mode of transport, worthy of initiatives. She wants to see that kind of attitude shift spread to other cities – Antalya will be next to develop a pilot cycling corridor – and to domestic companies.
“It’s the idea that it’s not about cars per se, it’s about climate change, mobility, democracy,” she says.
Who carries the torch?
Back to CSR’s educational deficit, and older, established NGOs such as Tog and Tema are pursuing the slow process of raising awareness of environmental and social sustainability issues among the Turkish populace. Yet since smaller nimble players such as Embarq may not have the institutional capacity, who will press the CR agenda inside companies?
Probably not the business associations, it seems. In existence since 1971, the Turkish Industry and Business Association (Tusiad) is one of the country’s most influential business organisations. Following Turkey’s application for EU membership in 1987, Tusiad has worked ceaselessly to align Turkish business standards and practices with those of the EU. That would seem to give corporate social responsibility at least a place at the conference table.
Tusiad president Ümit Boyner has made the right speeches about the low-carbon economy and Turkey’s needed to transition. “Intensive work,” she has said, is under way inside the organisation, for example, to create a framework for Turkey’s response to climate change.
When it comes to action, however, others in the corporate responsibility community are not so clear that Tusiad is committed. A CR study group, established in 2007, started out robustly but has seemed to peter out, according to Serdar Dinler.
That’s in line with what Melsa Ararat, director of the Corporate Governance Forum of Turkey, calls the “lack of success” by Tusiad and other business associations at proselytising corporate responsibility.
“They organise meetings and speakers – may publish papers – but when it comes to supporting the government to improve legislation that impacts the environment or other CSR issues, they do not take any action,” Ararat says. In fact, she suggests that they work to oppose more stringent environmental or other CR-relevant legislation that would impact companies’ competitiveness or profitability.
Observers seem unable to single out any one NGO with clear success in the responsibility/sustainability arena. The Turkish BCSD’s effort to create a Sustainability Index for the Istanbul Stock Exchange seems a current high note, however, especially as 80 companies have expressed interest. And the recent formation of a Turkish Business Network Linked-in CSR group with 500 members is a positive development.
Devin Bahceci, who has worked for the Turkish Green Party and in a variety of NGO roles, currently as secretary-general of the Earth Association, says the lack of a guiding NGO is particularly dire in the field of climate change.
“For me the test of NGO success is the ability to affect people and government to take necessary steps, both adaptation and mitigation, in order to prevent the destructive threats of climate change,” he says. Bahceci’s view is that there has not been an NGO in Turkey that has been able to do this. Powerful environmental NGOs are “not political enough” to influence the government, and they generally only provide services such as “planting trees”.
Bahceci says that from his observation, private sector support of NGOs is still quite low, and corporate responsibility initiatives inside more mainstream NGOs few and far between.
Yet Ararat says the pressure from Europe for Turkish companies to shift their vision from responsibility as an “add-on” to part of the core business strategy will continue. While the education and impetus to start that process may not come from the NGO world at all, once the process has begun Turkish companies’ results can be swift and fruitful.
April Streeter is a writer specialising in sustainability since 1998. She is a blogger for Tree Hugger and The Huffington Post. Streeter is an associate with One Stone.