Independent Labels? The Power behind Environmental Information about Products and Companies

Abstract

Power is a ubiquitous term in political science, and yet the discipline lacks a metric of power that can be applied to both formal and informal political contexts. Building on past work on power and power resources, this paper develops a method to estimate the power of different actors over an organization. It uses this method to analyze the power of the public, private, and civil sectors within an original dataset of 245 cases of product and corporate environmental evaluations, such as ENERGY STAR, LEED Certification, and Newsweek’s Greenest Company Rankings. These initiatives have received limited attention from the political science literature, but they have become an increasingly prominent political phenomenon. The paper finds that the private and civil sectors likely have more power over these information-based governance initiatives than the public sector. It also reveals their lack of transparency and hybrid accountability relationships, which complicate their legitimacy and effectiveness.

Keywords

power eco-labels sustainability ratings environmental governance transparency

Scholars have identified power as a critical concept in political science for decades (Easton 1971, 41, 115–124; Goodin and Klingemann 1998, 7–9; Grigsby 2008, 43; Lasswell and Kaplan 1950, 1), and dozens of departmental websites state that political science is, in fact, the study of power.¹ Despite this focus, a standard metric of power remains elusive for the discipline. Political scientists who study elections and legislatures have developed a variety of methods, including the Penrose measure, Shapley–Shubik index, and the Banzhaf index, for measuring the power of individual voters in institutional settings where formal voting is the standard decision-making procedure (Felsenthal and Machover 2011). Political scientists who study interest groups have used process tracing, attributed influence surveys, and preference attainment assessments to measure the power, or “influence,” of these organizations in more informal decision-making contexts (Dür 2008).²

The extraordinary range of methods used across the discipline, from preference attainment studies of teacher union influence on teacher salaries (Anzia 2011) to calculations of Banzhaf indices for Canadian provinces (Heard and Swartz 1998), suggests limited hope for a shared metric and even understanding of political power. Such methodological multiplicity stems from two main factors. The first is the strong degree of specialization that has occurred within the discipline (Jervis 2002), which has encouraged a narrow development of methods that are precisely fitted for particular contexts. The second is a focus on conceptualizing and measuring power as effectiveness at producing desired outcomes, or “power as control over events and outcomes” (Hart 1976). While laudable and important, such a task is often exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, and orients scholars toward researching topics that lend themselves to analyses using relevant but narrowly defined effectiveness metrics, such as the ideological direction of Supreme Court decisions, the voting record of legislators, or the content of bureaucratic rulemaking (Collins 2007; Fowler and Shaiko 1987; Klüver 2009; Yackee 2006).

An alternative approach is to focus on the “power resources” of different institutions as a proxy of their actual power and the power of the organizations providing those resources. Such an approach, which builds on scholarship within the discipline that pre-dates the recent specialization trend, is often more feasible, uses more generally applicable metrics of power, and enables political scientists to study the dynamics of power in contexts that lack readily available effectiveness data and have received less attention in the literature. These contexts often involve civil society organizations and private corporations playing important leadership and implementation roles, and the power of these non-elected entities can be far-reaching and significant.

Rudder (2008) argues persuasively that political science as a discipline has not paid sufficient attention to the exercise of power by such private actors over the daily lives of citizens, even though it can often displace or overshadow the power of the state (Barnett and Finnemore 1999; Cutler, Haufler, and Porter 1999; Mathews 1997). Given their increasing significance, it is critical to understand the identity and allegiances of these powerful private actors. The same applies to non-elected bureaucrats in public agencies. If these actors have not been elected by the public, who has “elected” them? Who wields “power” over them, and who is influencing their decisions? Are they representatives of corporations and the private sector, public authorities and the state, or advocacy organizations and civil society? How specifically do these different sectors of society influence these non-elected bodies?

This paper uses an adapted version of Ilchman and Uphoff’s (1969) power resources framework to address these questions. I use this framework to analyze the power behind one particular form of politics, information-based governance, which involves the provision of information to encourage collective action and has become popular among public, civil, and private actors in recent years. It relies on the power of persuasion to be effective, and includes initiatives that rate or certify the environmental performance of products and companies, such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and USDA Organic. The MSC, for example, provides information on seafood products in the form of a blue seal of approval to encourage consumers “to contribute to the health of the world’s oceans” by collectively buying from fisheries that are sustainably managed—and avoid products from those that are not.³

Hundreds of these initiatives have emerged across a wide range of economic sectors, and are often viewed as controversial substitutes for traditional regulatory approaches. Given this proliferation and controversy, the diversity of public, private, and civil sector actors that are supporting these programs, and the difficulty of directly measuring their power and effectiveness, environmental evaluations of products and companies represent an excellent example of information-based governance to analyze using a power resources framework. The paper presents results from an original dataset of 245 cases of such programs, and documents the types of organizations that are associated with these initiatives and the nature of those associations. This dataset shows that private and civil sector organizations likely have more power over these initiatives than public sector agencies, and that they rely on different power resources to do so.

The dataset also highlights a surprising lack of transparency among these programs, given their own demands for disclosure from companies. While these initiatives often claim to be “independent,” the paper reveals that they have intricate and overlapping connections to the private, public, and civil sectors, resulting in the creation of “power hybrids” that are accountable to multiple masters. Building on the distinction between persuasion and manipulation, these findings raise important questions about the accountability and legitimacy of organizations that either are not transparent about their sources of power or use power resources from multiple sectors that may have conflicting interests and goals.

The paper contributes to our understanding of power and demonstrates the value and limitations of Ilchman and Uphoff’s (1969) power resources framework. It presents a novel approach to measuring the “power fingerprint” of different sectors on a particular form of governance. This approach can be used to analyze the internal power dynamics within other forms of governance and types of organizations, such as political parties, interest groups, organizational coalitions, bureaucratic agencies, and corporations. The paper introduces the concepts of power opacity and hybridity that are also broadly applicable to studies of both formal and informal political organizations.

The first section of the paper describes the power and politics of information-based governance strategies, and outlines the main components of the power resources framework. The second section describes the methods used to collect and analyze the data presented in the paper, and the third section presents data on the organizations behind the cases in the dataset—the power behind the persuasion. The fourth section discusses three major insights from the paper relating to the dynamics of sectoral power, the nature of power hybrids, and the opacity of power. It also explores the study’s limitations and directions for future research. The fifth section summarizes the paper’s contributions and implications.

Information, Power, and Politics

Political scientists have long grappled with the concept of power, and it remains a ubiquitous term in the field. This resilience reveals the importance of the underlying idea that the term power is attempting to capture, which in the most general sense is “the capacity to affect results” (Smith 1951). The study of politics requires an understanding of this capacity in different actors. As Dahl (1957) suggests, this understanding should explain how actors attempt to achieve their goals—to what extent they use different “bases” and “means” of power and to what extent other actors respond to their efforts.

Both private and public actors have multiple forms of power at their disposal. One common distinction made by scholars is between power that is based on the use of physical force and power that is based on the use of economic incentives (Grigsby 2008). Whether it is French and Raven’s (1959) coercive versus reward power, Etzioni’s (1975) utilitarian versus coercive compliance, Poggi’s (2001) allocation via exchange versus command, Lasswell and Kaplan’s (1950) wealth versus power (as severe sanctions), or Ilchman and Uphoff’s (1969) economic resources versus physical force, they are all referring to the same two choices—the proverbial “carrot and stick.”

These two dimensions can illuminate an important range of governance strategies that actors can pursue. Governance, like power, is a broadly used term, but can be defined in this context as the use of power to encourage collective action and create public goods.⁴ Governance is therefore distinct from its opposite, anarchy (i.e., the use of power in the absence of governance and collective action), and the more inclusive concept of politics (i.e., the use of power for any means). Governance strategies that only use the stick of physical force (or threat thereof) are examples of traditional “command-and-control” regulation-based governance. Strategies that only use the carrot of economic incentives (e.g., tax credits, market opportunities, low-interest loans) are examples of voluntary market-based governance. Strategies that use both carrots and sticks, such as “sin” taxes on smoking or pollution cap and trade programs, are examples of mandatory market-based governance. Strategies that use neither economic incentives nor physical force are examples of what I call information-based governance.

The Power of Information: Beyond Carrots and Sticks

This fourth category of governance exists in many different forms and is the only type of governance that does not make direct use of either “reward power” or “coercive power” (Elias 2008). It can take the form of either persuasion (i.e., the transparent use of non-coercive power) or manipulation (i.e., the hidden use of non-coercive power; Grigsby 2008). Information-based governance has become increasingly popular as an alternative to other forms of governance that rely on force or exchange. Examples include credit and bond ratings, school rankings, hospital and movie ratings, product eco-labels, and sustainability awards. These initiatives often use a mix of moral, technological, and descriptive arguments to make their case and may apply their power either openly or secretly.

In recent years, scholars have increasingly focused on how the provision of information can influence politics. For example, the effects of information asymmetries and framing on public opinion have been explored in a variety of contexts (Chong and Druckman 2007; Lupia 1992). Other scholars have explored the effects of the strategic control and provision of information in the contexts of personal Social Security Statements (Cook, Jacobs, and Kim 2010), expert participation in policy processes and political decision-making (Grindle 1977), bureaucratic agencies in their relations with Congress (Epstein and O’Halloran 1994), and interest group engagement in both legislative and judicial processes (Hansford 2011; Lohmann 1998). More generally, Converse (1985) has analyzed the suppression of information as a political strategy, and Reed (2003) has explored the effects of information asymmetry on the probability of military conflict between states.

All this work relates to more theoretical discussions of the relationship between knowledge and power. In 1597, Bacon famously stated that “Scientia potentia est,” which is the origin of today’s popular aphorism, “Knowledge is power” (Rodriguez Garcia 2001). Foucault later re-framed this relationship as being more complex and bi-directional—“in knowing we control and in controlling we know” (Gutting 2008). Work by Haas (1992) and Barnett and Finnemore (1999) has documented these dynamics in the context of international organizations and epistemic communities, which use their power to classify knowledge, interpret uncertainty, and pursue specific goals. The literature on norm diffusion also highlights the power of ideas and knowledge (Park 2006). Central to this power is the creation and distribution of information, which can be defined as the translation of knowledge into explicit words and symbols that can influence the knowledge and actions of others (Stenmark 2001).

The Politics of Information: A Tale of Three Sectors

Actors that use information-based governance strategies therefore have a significant amount of power. This power can be exercised by both directly affecting the decisions of individual citizens and consumers and indirectly by catalyzing the enhancement of other forms of governance, such as regulations. Who controls these initiatives—“who persuades these persuaders”—and how they exert their control are therefore critical questions for political scientists to explore. The actors who may be behind these initiatives can be divided into three general categories—organizations and individuals from the public, private, and civil sectors. The public sector comprises all state-owned institutions, including government agencies and nationalized industries (“Public Sector” 2013). The private sector “encompasses all for-profit businesses that are not owned or operated by the government” (“Private Sector” 2013). The civil sector, or “civil society,” is the “sphere of institutions, organizations, and individuals located between the family, the state, and the market in which people associate voluntarily to advance common interests” (Anheier 2004, 22). Given their similar goals and orientations, both non-profit and public academic institutions are classified as civil sector organizations for the purposes of this paper.

Scholars have identified a wide range of ways that the private, public, and civil sectors of society have used information to encourage collective action and further their interests. Private actors frequently use information internally to govern their own businesses, through employee evaluations, ratings of supply chain performance, and balanced scorecards (Gunasekaran, Patel, and McGaughey 2004; Houldsworth and Jirasinghe 2006; Kaplan and Norton 1996). Public authorities have also made extensive use of information for governance purposes, such as through the provision of statistical information about social and economic trends (Cullen 1975) and mandatory disclosure and labeling requirements (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007). Civil society organizations have used information-based strategies to advance their interests across a wide range of issues, including consumer protection, education policy, and gun control (Bimber 2003).

Such information-based initiatives have become particularly prominent in the environmental field. Since 1975, when Congress created the original EnergyGuide Program, nearly 450 environmental product certifications, ratings, and “eco-labels” have been introduced (Big Room Inc. 2013). Environmental evaluations of companies by organizations such as Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists have proliferated as well. Scholars have examined government programs such as the Toxics Release Inventory (Kraft, Stephan, and Abel 2011), non-profit initiatives such as the Forest Stewardship Council (Cashore, Auld, and Newsom 2004), and private sector initiatives such as the chemical industry’s Responsible Care program (Prakash 2000). These programs may be either voluntary or mandatory, and may be applied to either single industries or across multiple sectors.

This discussion shows that the public, private, and civil sectors are all engaged in information-based governance, and suggests that each of these sectors may be the most likely to use information-based governance initiatives. Each sector has specific interests that could motivate their use of these strategies—in general, companies want to capture market share, governments want to correct market failures, and non-profit organizations want to advance their specific causes. The private sector arguably has both the most incentive and capacity to provide information about itself that advances its interests. By providing positive information about the products they manufacture and/or sell, both suppliers and retailers can gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Given the political controversy and fiscal constraints associated with regulation-based, mandatory market-based, and voluntary market-based governance, the public sector also has a strong incentive to explore less politically controversial and less costly information-based approaches to creating public goods. Civil sector actors may also be attracted to these strategies because of their relatively low cost and ability to mobilize support.

The Power Resource Framework

How might these different types of organizations engage in or support information-based governance strategies? The power resource framework developed by Ilchman and Uphoff (1969) provides a useful approach to address this question, as it identifies the key mechanisms, or “resources,” that organizations use to exert power over these initiatives. Building on work by other social scientists such as French and Raven (1959), Dahl (1957), Wrong (1979), and Lasswell and Kaplan (1950), this framework identifies economic resources, social status, physical force, legitimacy, authority, and information as the primary resources of power. Such a focus on power resources can reveal “the proximate causes of effects we wish to understand” by directing attention to “who claims authority over whom, and on what issues” and “who accords legitimacy to whom, on what grounds, and with what limitations” (Uphoff 1989, 321). More specifically, it can help explain why ratings and labels are designed the way they are and who is driving and endorsing those design decisions.

The first four types of resources that the framework describes are relatively straightforward. Physical force is perhaps the most obvious power resource, and includes both the actual force and the threats of force that are used in law enforcement (Ilchman and Uphoff 1969, 70–73). Economic resources are another commonly used way to exert power (Ilchman and Uphoff 1969, 58–60), while social status is a less tangible but no less important power resource. As “the position in the hierarchy of social prestige” (Marshall in Ilchman and Uphoff 1969, 60), status is “by nature scarce” and flows from attitudes about social roles (Ilchman and Uphoff 1969, 60). Information is another powerful resource, as it can improve the use of other power resources and can subtly influence the behavior of other actors (Uphoff 1989).

The last two types of power resources are more complex. Ilchman and Uphoff (1969, 81) refer to authority as a resource that indicates the “right to speak in the name of the state and to declare public policies.” While this is a reasonable definition, for the purposes of this paper, it is too narrow and corresponds too directly with the definition of the public sector above. It also reveals a missing element in their framework—operational leadership. Because Ilchman and Uphoff were analyzing power resources from the perspective of the “statesman,” they assume that the user of the power resources they outline is a public figure. In many contexts, however, who leads an initiative and makes its day-to-day decisions is not a given, but the result of negotiation and contestation. Organizational leaders may be public “authorities,” but they may also be private or civil actors. Authority in this context therefore should be more broadly defined as the claimed right to make the operational and strategic decisions for an initiative.

Their sixth power resource is legitimacy, which Uphoff (1989, 301), building on Weber’s discussion of the term, defines as “a conviction on the part of persons subject to authority that it is right and proper and that they have some obligation to obey.” He emphasizes the difference between authority and legitimacy—the former is a “claim for compliance” while the latter is an acceptance of that claim. Legitimacy is an evaluation of particular decisions, the suitability of those who make those decisions, and the overall system of authority (Uphoff 1989).

Ilchman and Uphoff (1969) therefore outline six resources that actors can use to exercise power over information-based governance strategies—physical force, economic resources, social status, information, authority (here broadly defined as operational leadership), and legitimacy. These resources can be used in a variety of ways. Physical force, for example, can be deployed as threats of mandatory fines or imprisonment if specific commands—such as the mandatory provision of information or the cessation of fraudulent or illegal claims—are not obeyed (Ilchman and Uphoff 1969, 72). Status can be transferred in the form of either implicit or explicit social recognition—overt statements communicating esteem or symbolic behaviors showing respect (Ilchman and Uphoff 1969, 60). Authority can be either held, delegated, or shared through the allocation of influence over decision-making processes (Ilchman and Uphoff 1969, 84). For example, an organization can nominate individuals to a board of directors, invite advisors for technical advice, and engage in partnerships and collaborations.

This framework is more comprehensive, parsimonious, balanced, and rigorous than other general power resource models (Uphoff 1989), and complements more recently developed frameworks designed specifically to analyze the power resources of interest groups and bureaucracies. For example, the social status and legitimacy resources map to the political support factor in Meier’s (2006, 57–69) open systems model of government bureaus and the metrics of membership size, number of organizations in a side, and number of major policy advocates in Baumgartner et al.’s (2009, 224) interest group resource index. Unlike Meier’s model, however, it does not distinguish between internal and external resources and instead usefully focuses attention solely on the power inputs from outside organizations. And unlike Baumgartner et al.’s index, it is not limited to economic, social status, and legitimacy resources but includes physical force, authority, and information resources as well. While Ilchman and Uphoff’s (1969) approach has its limitations, which I discuss in more detail below, it offers the most appropriate method for systematically analyzing the power resources of different sectors within organizations.

Research Method

Their framework, however, has not yet been used to analyze the power dynamics present in specific organizational contexts. I aim to fill this gap in the literature by using the framework to identify which sector is likely exerting the most power over a particular form of information-based governance—environmental evaluations of products and companies. The discussion above suggests that the private, public, and civil sectors each have strong motives for supporting these strategies. The power resource framework allows me to determine not only which of these sectors most likely has the most direct authority over these initiatives but also which are most commonly funding, informing, endorsing, and influencing them.

To complete this analysis, the text from the websites of 245 cases of eco-labels, corporate green ratings, and other forms of environmental evaluation was copied into the qualitative coding software, MaxQDA. These cases were selected through a multi-step process that first involved aggregating several relevant online databases and lists of relevant programs from Ecolabelling.org, Ecolabels.org, AllGreenRatings.com, the Global Ecolabelling Network, and the ISEAL Alliance (originally named the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance). Programs were also identified by reviewing relevant news reports, academic articles, blogs, and similar sources of information between 2006 and 2008. To identify additional information-based environmental governance initiatives, I also conducted a series of 168 systematic keyword searches on Google for seven keywords (“eco-labels,” “green ratings,” “green rankings,” “green products,” “green companies,” “environmental certifications,” and “environmentally-friendly companies”) combined with twenty-four product category names (e.g., airlines, electronics, toys, etc.). This process resulted in a list of 471 initiatives, identified through the end of 2008.

From this initial list, only initiatives with the following characteristics were selected for inclusion in the study: “Information-based environmental governance initiatives that generate publicly available environmental evaluations of products or companies that make products that are generally available in the U.S. marketplace.” This definition includes product and company environmental certifications, ratings, rankings, awards, databases, reviews, and boycotts, and excludes programs that have closed-down websites, do not make their information publicly available, or generate information that is only relevant to local, regional, or international markets. It also excludes anonymous, hearsay, and generic claims, such as “natural” or “recyclable,” that do not have a single, traceable source. The rigor of this case selection process, which reduced the number of cases included in the study to 245, ensures that the dataset includes cases with similar characteristics. The comprehensiveness of the case identification process, which gathered data from a wide range of independent sources, ensures that the dataset includes a large proportion, if not the vast majority, of publicly available product eco-labels and corporate sustainability ratings that are relevant to the U.S. marketplace.

The 2,533 documents collected from the websites of these 245 initiatives were coded by two trained coders using a codebook of 106 binary characteristics related to the organizational attributes of the selected cases. The codes cover five different types of institutions that are involved in the cases—retailers, suppliers, academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and government agencies (non-profit trade associations of suppliers were coded as both non-profit and suppliers). These institutional types were coded if the type was explicitly mentioned (e.g., “Initiative A was implemented by a non-profit organization”) or if an organization mentioned in the text is a well-known example of that type of institution (e.g., “Initiative A is a project of Greenpeace”). A common list of such institutions was used by both raters to improve coding reliability. The coding system also documents seven different ways these organizations could be involved in the cases—implementation, association, partnerships, design involvement, provision of data, funding, and use or endorsement. These categories are described in more detail below.

Ten percent of the cases were coded by both coders to analyze their inter-rater reliability. At the aggregate level, the coding process generated reliable results, with the average level of agreement being 92 percent (average κ = .27; average z = 2.49; average probability that agreement is due to chance = 14%). Lower levels of inter-rater reliability were found for some individual codes, including those for government and academic association, government data, non-profit design, and use and endorsement (kappa values ranging from −.09 to .24). This may be due to a prevalence effect and the low frequency of these codes.

To identify the extent to which the private, public, and civil sectors are using the different power resources to exert power over these cases, I aggregated similar codes to create additional sector-level variables or “power resource metrics.” For each type of involvement (e.g., funding), cases with either non-profit or academic codes (and no other organization codes) were coded as “civil sector,” while cases with either retailer or supplier codes (and no others) were coded as “private sector.” Cases with only government codes were coded as “public sector.” I also created codes for mixed sector involvement—“public–private,” “private–civil,” “public–civil,” and “public–private–civil.” Each type of involvement maps to the different power resources described above. Funding maps directly to economic resources, as data do to information and use/endorsement does to social status. Given that authority can be delegated and shared through collaborations, partnerships, and other associations, I created a shared authority index that aggregates data on these types of organizational associations. I also created indices of civil, private, and public sector use of each power resource, which are explained in more detail below.

Given that information-based governance by definition does not use physical force, it is not associated with any of the types of involvement. As this study focuses on claims made by the cases and not on the perspectives of their audiences, legitimacy is also not associated with any of the collected data. The relevance of physical force to these strategies and the legitimacy implications of the study’s results are, however, discussed in more detail below. The adapted framework used in this study therefore focuses on the other four power resources described by Ilchman and Uphoff (1969)—authority, economic resources, information, and status. As described below, the framework also differentiates between direct and indirect authority. Figure 1 outlines Ilchman and Uphoff’s original framework, the adapted framework used in this study, and the specific types of involvement that serve as metrics of the different power resources discussed above.

Figure 1.

The power resources framework and types of organizational involvement (power resource metrics).

The Power behind the Persuasion

This section summarizes the results of this analysis to identify the powers behind the persuasion—the organizations and their related sectors that exert power over the information-based governance strategies in the dataset. Figure 2 shows which sectors most commonly deploy the four power resources—authority, economic resources, information, and status—that serve as the primary mechanisms by which they can exert their power. Each of these resources is discussed in the sections below.

Figure 2.

Power resources of the public, private, and civil sectors in environmental evaluations of products and companies (n = 245).

Authority: Organizational Leadership and Associations

The most obvious way an organization can exert power over an initiative is to lead it—to be the primary institution that has the authority to make its day-to-day operational and strategic decisions. Such authority can direct an initiative to focus on certain issues and methods while ignoring others, which can benefit certain actors while disadvantaging others. As Panel A in Figure 1 illustrates, initiatives that describe themselves as being implemented solely by civil sector organizations are the most common type of initiative in the dataset (33%). These include advocacy organizations such as Environmental Defense, certification organizations such as the Forest Stewardship Council, media organizations such as the National Geographic Society, rating organizations such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, research institutions such as the Aspen Institute, and academic institutions such as Claremont McKenna College.

Cases led solely by private sector organizations (23%) are the second most common type of case. Companies leading these initiatives include HP, Amazon.com, Whole Foods, and Staples. Retailers account for 72 percent of the cases led by the private sector, while 28 percent are led by suppliers (i.e., manufacturers of products being evaluated). Initiatives led solely by public sector organizations account for 6 percent of the cases and include programs such as ENERGY STAR, Design for the Environment, and Certified Organic. Only seven cases are led by more than one sector. These include non-profit organizations, such as the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association, that serve as business associations for suppliers of the products being evaluated. They also include collaborations between civil and private sector organizations, such as the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. The type of implementation organization could not be identified for over a third of the cases.

These results provide a valuable snapshot of the types of organizations that are implementing these initiatives. However, authority over information-based governance strategies can be wielded in ways beyond their direct implementation. An initiative’s leader may delegate or share its authority with other organizations, through partnerships and coalitions, associations via advisory boards and boards of directors, and direct involvement in the design of the initiative. Such indirect authority can be used to recommend certain approaches that would cast either a positive or negative light on organizations being evaluated. Each of these three types of authority sharing was coded and combined into an aggregate metric of “organizational association” by each sector.

Panel B of Figure 2 shows that associations with either civil (12%) or private (13%) sector organizations are most commonly mentioned on the websites, followed by associations with both private and civil organizations (9%). Initiatives only mentioning associations with civil sector organizations include FishWise and Citizens Market, while those only mentioning associations with private sector organizations include the Corporate Responsibility Index and the Green Hotels certification. An example of an initiative with associations with both civil and private firms is the Forest Stewardship Council. Over 50 percent of the cases do not mention any such associations.

Economic Resources: Organizational Funding

Organizations can also exert power over these initiatives by funding them. Funds can come with explicit or implicit strings attached that require an initiative to use a particular method or set of criteria that would benefit the funder. As Panel C in Figure 2 shows, cases that only mention financing from private sector organizations are the most common in the dataset (8%), and suppliers account for 80 percent of those organizations. One case, the Best Aquaculture Practices certification, mentions financial support from both suppliers (ten “visionary industry leaders”) and retailers (Darden Restaurants). Organizations mentioning funding from only the civil sector (4%) and from all three sectors (3%) are the next most common. An example of an organization only receiving civil sector funding is the Electronic Takeback Coalition’s TV Companies Report Card and an example of an organization receiving funding from all three sectors is the Marine Stewardship Council. Approximately 7 percent of the cases receive funding from more than one sector. Notably, 79 percent of the cases do not provide any information about their funding sources.

Information: Data Sources

The information used by information-based governance is a power resource itself, and can serve as a mechanism by which the sources of that information can exert power over these strategies. For example, initiatives that rely on data provided by companies are limited to what information those companies provide to them. Companies can provide false or misleading data that obscures their true environmental performance. As Panel D in Figure 2 shows, cases that only mention private sector organizations as their source of data are the most common in the dataset (13%), and all of these organization are suppliers (as opposed to retailers). Examples of cases that only mention the use of private sector data are ENERGY STAR, Climate Counts, and the Chemical Home. Cases that only mention the public sector as its source of data are the second most common type of case. Examples of these cases include the Auto Asthma Index and FishWise. Cumulatively, 15 percent of the cases use data from more than one sector. Across all cases (both those that use data from one type of sector and multiple sectors), the number of cases that use data from public and private sector sources is statistically equivalent (22%–23%).

Status: Use and Endorsement

Organizations can also exert power over information-based initiatives by recognizing and granting prestige to them (or by withholding such recognition). Prestige can be transferred explicitly by endorsement or implicitly by their use of the initiative’s information. For example, Green Home states that it has “received endorsements from throughout the environmental community, including Environmental Defense and The Earth Charter,” while EPEAT (originally named the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) lists organizations that have instituted an EPEAT certification purchasing requirement, including the United States Marine Corps, the City of San Francisco, and Yale University. Similar to funding, such endorsements can come with a quid pro quo—to earn the endorsement, an initiative must commit to a certain approach that would benefit the endorser. Panel E in Figure 2 reveals that cases that only mention such recognition from the private sector are the most common in the dataset (10%), with retailers being mentioned in 62 percent of those cases and suppliers being mentioned in 50 percent of them. Some examples of cases that only mention endorsements or use by the private sector are Cradle to Cradle certification, Dolphin Safe, and the Best 50 Corporate Citizens. Approximately 5 percent of the cases mention endorsements or use by organizations from more than one sector. Nearly 80 percent of the cases do not provide any information about endorsements or use by government, non-profit, academic, retailers, or suppliers.

The Power Fingerprint

The sections above document four different resources—authority, economic resources, information, and status—that organizations and sectors can use to exert power over information-based governance strategies. Figure 3 aggregates these data into a single snapshot of the power of the public, private, and public sectors over the 245 cases in this dataset. I created this snapshot, or power “fingerprint,” by creating indices of civic, public, and private power for each type of resource discussed above. The index assigns a 1 to a sector for every case when that sector is the only sector that contributes a particular power resource (e.g., funding), a .5 for every case it contributes a power resource together with one other sector, and a .33 when all three sectors contribute that power resource to the case. The total score for each sector is divided by 1,225 (245 cases × 5 power resources), which scales the index by the number of cases and resources analyzed. Thus, the index value for any particular sector’s power resources is a percentage of the total power fingerprint across all cases and power resources.

Figure 3.

Power fingerprints of public, private, and civil sectors in environmental evaluations of products and companies (n = 245).

Hypothetically, if all the cases in the dataset only used power resources (funding, data, endorsements, etc.) from public sector organizations, the public sector power index would be 1, and the value for each public sector power resource would be .2 (1/5). As Figure 3 shows, the public sector’s overall fingerprint index in this dataset of cases is .07, compared with the private sector’s index of .17 and the civil sector’s index of .14. Note that this is a power “fingerprint” analysis that measures the presence of different sectors, not a power “footprint” analysis that would measure their actual level of involvement in each case. Such an analysis would require knowledge of the actual amount of funding provided, data used, and depth of association from each organization, and is beyond the scope of this study. Such information is also difficult to obtain, and so the power fingerprint approach provides a valuable proxy metric of these power relationships in the absence of more detailed information.

The Dynamics of Power

These results demonstrate that the power behind information-based governance is complex and multi-dimensional. The literature suggests that such power can be understood in several ways. It can be viewed as the probability that an actor will be “in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance” (Weber 1947, 152), or as Dahl (1957, 202-203) explains in his often-quoted statement—“A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Power can also be understood as an ability to complete a particular task (Morriss 2011). This understanding relates to Morriss’s distinction between “power over” and “power to”—the ability to do something versus the ability to get someone else to do something (Pansardi 2011). A further useful distinction is the three faces of power—the power to decide, the power to influence (the “power of non–decision-making”), and the power to dominate (the ability to make individuals “want things that they would otherwise oppose”; Angolano 2011).

These distinctions can help us analyze the results presented above. These results reveal that external organizations have the potential to exert power over environmental evaluations of products and companies in a wide variety of ways. For example, Dell provides data on its environmental performance for Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics Guide and also designates a representative to serve on the Climate Savers Computing Initiative’s Board of Directors. The World Wildlife Fund has helped fund the carbon credit Gold Standard and has endorsed the Forest Stewardship Council certification. The Environmental Protection Agency implements ENERGY STAR while serving on the Board of Advisors of EPEAT.

Using Dahl’s (1957) terms, these organizations have developed a wide range of power bases and means to exert control over these programs. As Uphoff (1989) explains, a focus on power resources enables a closer analysis of the causes of the behaviors of these programs and the sources and degrees of power being exerted over them. While it is important not to make the vehicle fallacy of equating power with the means by which power is exerted, the measurement of power resources can serve as a useful proxy metric of the power of different actors when power itself is difficult to measure (Bosworth 2011). This paper demonstrates that such measurement of power resources can indeed provide important insights into the dynamics of power within organizations. It also highlights an important set of questions for future research. These insights and questions relate to the three general themes that I explore further below—differences in sectoral power, the concept of power hybrids, and the opacity of power.

Differences in Sectoral Power

The results above reveal that all three sectors of society are attempting to use their resources to exert power over information-based environmental governance strategies, although not to the same extent. In terms of the number of cases the public sector is associated with across the four different power resources analyzed, it has much less power over these programs than either the private or civil sectors. One exception is in the context of information resources—it is the second most common provider of data to these initiatives, after the private sector. Even this source of power, however, is limited because much of the public sector data used by the cases is self-reported by companies, with minimal verification by government agencies.

Another exception is the government’s latent threat of physical force, which in this context manifests itself in four ways. The first is through the executive power of the Federal Trade Commission to bring lawsuits against fraudulent claims, while the second is the judicial power of the courts to rule on copyright and trademark violations relevant to eco-labels and sustainability ratings. The third is the monopoly power that Congress has granted to certain government agencies over the use of specific terms, such as “organic.” As the USDA’s website states, agricultural products that use the word organic but do not meet all the requirements of the USDA organic regulations may face fines up to $11,000 (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2012). The fourth is the government’s power to mandate the disclosure of information to programs such as the Toxics Release Inventory and EnergyGuide label. Government involvement therefore may be limited to a small number of initiatives, but its broader effects may still be extensive.

As the power fingerprints in Figure 3 shows, the private sector is most commonly represented in the 245 cases across the combined four power resources, although the civil sector is close behind. Civil society organizations are most commonly in positions of direct authority in these programs, while private companies are the most common sources of economic resources, information, and status. Among the private sector actors, suppliers more commonly provide data and funding to the cases while retailers more commonly provide leadership and endorsements. The civil sector organizations primarily consist of both older broad-based advocacy organizations (e.g., Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund) and younger, more specialized non-profits (e.g., Marine Stewardship Council, Climate Counts).

These results address the paper’s primary questions about the types of organizations that are behind environmental ratings and labels. The data suggest that no one sector is dominating the control of these programs, and that they are clearly not a simple extension of government power. The “plurality of power” over these initiatives is closely divided between civil and private sector organizations. The former exercises more formal authority and displays more of the “first face of power” through its positions of leadership in these programs. The latter exerts much of its power through the data, funding, and endorsements it provides to the cases, which arguably are examples of both the “second” and “third” faces of power, as these resources have a strong ability to both influence decisions and affect people’s underlying preferences. The strong presence of the private sector is arguably not surprising, given that these initiatives focus on evaluating products and companies. The widespread role of civil society organizations is perhaps more unexpected and reinforces the perception that information-based governance has become an increasingly important advocacy strategy in recent years.

This analysis raises several important questions about sectoral power, both generally and in the context of information-based governance. First, does this resource-based metric of power correlate with other measures of power? Additional studies using both qualitative and quantitative methods could explore this question. For example, in-depth case studies could attempt to document the actual levels of funding, information, and influence that these three sectors provide to a smaller set of initiatives. A survey of employees at these programs could gauge their perceptions of sectoral power within their organizations. Distinguishing between different types of civil and private sector organizations beyond retailers and suppliers and academic and non-profits would also be valuable.

Power Hybrids

A second important theme in this analysis is the presence of “power hybrids.” Hybridity is an ancient idea signifying a subversion of boundaries, and dates back to at least Herodotus (McWilliams 2013). In this context, power hybrids are cases in which power associated with a particular resource is shared between two or more sectors. This concept relates to the idea of public–private partnerships but is conceptually broader because it includes partnerships between civil society and the private sector. It is more similar to the concept of cross-sector partnerships, which “involve a commitment of resources—time and effort—by individuals from all partner organizations” and “requires active rather than passive involvement from all parties” (Waddock in Googins and Rochlin 2000). A power hybrid, however, may involve passive or active involvement from multiple sectors. The concept therefore enables both a wider and more granular analysis of power sharing within organizations.

This paper reveals that most of the analyzed cases are power hybrids. Approximately 35 percent of the cases are “intra-resource hybrids”—multiple sectors provide them with the same power resource (e.g., receive funding from the private and public sectors). An additional 21 percent are “inter-resource hybrids”—multiple sectors provide them with different power resources (e.g., receive funding from the private sector and data from the public sector). Information (15% of cases) and indirect authority (20% of cases) are the most common types of resources to be provided by multiple sectors. Across all power resources, cases that use power resources from both private and civil sector organizations are the most common type of power hybrid (14% of cases). Tri-sector power sharing of a power resource occurs in 10 percent of cases, and the most common type of resource shared among these cases is indirect authority. Cases that only mention the use of resources from a single sector accounted for 31 percent of the cases (18% use only private sector resources, 10% only civil sector resources, and 3% only public sector resources).

These power hybrids have intricate and complex relationships with private, public, and civil society actors, which can enable these initiatives to reach wider audiences and be more effective. They also can create significant conflicts of interests and cross pressures of accountability that can result in “multiple accountability disorder” (Koppell 2005; Romzek and Ingraham 2000). This “problem of multiple masters” (Romzek and Dubnick 1998) can have a negative feedback effect on the legitimacy of the initiative. Accountability relationships involve both the giving of account and the imposition of consequences, and can be “a critical element in the construction and contestation of legitimacy claims” (Black 2008, 149). Unclear and complex accountability relationships can therefore undermine an organization’s legitimacy and the persuasiveness of the information it provides.

The concepts of power hybrids and power resources bring analytical clarity to the dynamics of partnerships—both implicit and explicit—between sectors. They also highlight several important questions for further research. How do conflicts of interest manifest themselves in these initiatives? What are the benefits of these collaborations? How do these programs manage their multiple relationships of accountability? Under what conditions do civil, public, and private sector organizations tend to control power hybrids? What are the effects of power sharing across power resources (inter-resource hybridity) versus power sharing within power resources (intra-resource hybridity)? These questions should be examined by individual case studies of hybrid power relationships in programs covering a range of economic sectors.

The Opacity of Power

The third major theme of this analysis is the limited information that many information-based environmental governance strategies provide about themselves. One-third of the cases do not provide any information about the type of organization behind them, over half (52%) do not provide any information about the organizations that are advising or partnering with them, and nearly two-thirds (62%) do not provide any information about their data sources. Approximately 80 percent do not mention any of their funding sources or any organizations that have endorsed them or used their services, while 12 percent do not disclose any information about any of the four resources of power discussed in this paper. Only two cases (<1%), FishWise and EPEAT, provide information about all four resources.

This analysis has documented how these initiatives are presenting themselves to the world and reveals what users of these programs have the opportunity to perceive about them. Those cases that are not transparent about who is leading, funding, advising, recognizing, and informing them are engaging in classic manipulation. As Dowding (2011, 398) explains, manipulation occurs when “A manipulates B by getting B to choose something B would not otherwise have done by restricting B’s alternatives in some manner, where B does not understand that A is thus affecting his or her choice.” By not providing relevant information about themselves, these cases are restricting the public’s ability to evaluate their credibility and conflicts of interest. They are also limiting the public’s knowledge of who may be influencing their decisions by providing them with incomplete and biased information.

This discussion brings up the important distinction between persuasion and manipulation. Persuasion can be considered the act of “changing another’s beliefs and attitudes” (Cobb and Kuklinski 1997), and its importance to political order has been recognized since Plato and Aristotle (Triadafilopoulos 1999; Wiser 1977). Its goal is “to change the target’s mind, to cause the target to see his or her position as incorrect and the speaker’s position as correct” (Paine 1989), and plays an important and natural role in democratic discourse (Cobb and Kuklinski 1997). Manipulation is “concerned not with changing individuals’ beliefs but with maneuvering them into choices that are the ones the manipulator desires” (Paine 1989, 37). Such manipulation can be accomplished by limiting the available alternatives, misrepresenting information, and emphasizing particular interpretations of available alternatives (Lau, Smith, and Fiske 1991). This is often accomplished by making certain dimensions of an issue more salient than others and forcing a “target to choose among alternatives chosen by the manipulator” (Paine 1989).

All information-based governance initiatives by definition use persuasion to accomplish their goals. To the extent they limit or bias the information they provide to advance their own ends, they are also practicing manipulation. This is especially true when they do so without the knowledge of their audiences and when their audiences are ignorant of their identities and loyalties. Both Hannah Arendt and Aristotle emphasize the “centrality of character [ethos] in effective communication,” and the need for audiences to know about the “qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings” of those who are speaking to them (Triadafilopoulos 1999). By not providing such information about themselves, these information-based initiatives risk undermining their effectiveness and legitimacy. The widespread lack of disclosure threatens the legitimacy of not only individual cases but also the phenomenon of information-based governance in general.

Critical philosophy and the work of Bacon and Descartes may have contributed to the prevalence of such manipulative practices. As Wiser (1977) points out, these philosophers’ emphasis on the “explicit character of true knowledge” leads to a conclusion that persuasion in the Platonic and Aristotelian sense is unnecessary—the truth should be self-evident to the “purged mind.” Such a philosophy “points to a utopia of consensus” and “implies an intolerance of dissent.” For those who have grasped this true knowledge, manipulation therefore is a morally acceptable, if not morally required, means to an end. This attitude arguably pervades not only information-based strategies but also modern politics more generally.

However, such bald manipulation can be offensive to many audiences, and this study highlights an important strategy that can mask its use—the creation of organizational “translucence.” By being transparent about some areas while remaining opaque about others, actors can appear translucent and be simultaneously both persuading and manipulating their audiences. For example, sixty-three cases in the dataset explicitly claim to be implemented by non-profit organizations, but fail to provide any information about their funding sources. While appearing to be an improvement over total opacity, such translucence may be even more problematic because it gives audiences a false sense of knowledge about a source of information when in fact they know very little about it.

Limitations and Future Research

This study has several limitations that provide a foundation for future research. It focuses on the sources of power information-based strategies, not on the effects and effectiveness of that power. It therefore does not directly assess the relative power of these initiatives, or identify whether certain types of initiatives are more or less effective. The paper can therefore be complemented by studies of the power of these initiatives to control “events and outcomes” (Hart 1976), and whether the business, government, and civil society organizations behind them are able to get them to do what they want. Given the paucity of effectiveness data, however, this work can be challenging, and in its absence, many audiences are likely to use sectoral affiliations as their primary criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of environmental labels and ratings.

This point relates to an additional limitation of this study—it does not include direct measures of the perceived legitimacy of these initiatives. While the power resources granted to these labels and ratings reflect an implicit recognition of their legitimacy by the resource providers, a more direct and broad-based measure of legitimacy would require a different methodology (e.g., consumer surveys, stakeholder interviews) that is beyond the scope of this paper. Such an analysis would reveal the extent to which specific programs are perceived as legitimate and trustworthy by different audiences and whether the organizational attributes, power dynamics, and lack of transparency identified in this study are indeed important to them.

A further limitation of this study is the self-reported nature of the data provided on the websites of these programs. Initiatives may be either technically unable or strategically unwilling to share everything about their organizational affiliations, funding, and other power resources online, and thus this dataset may not accurately reflect the power behind them. This issue stems from the inherent difficulty in obtaining independent information about these initiatives, and plagues attempts to directly measure their power and effectiveness as well. Fortunately, there is no a priori reason to believe that this limitation biases the data in any particular direction; for example, the private sector may be more motivated to hide its involvement in these programs, but it may also be associated with initiatives that have more financial resources and technical capacity to build broadly informative websites. Even if a systematic bias exists in the data, it is nevertheless useful to document and analyze the claims—and absence of claims—these organizations are making about their power resources.

The dataset may also not be a fully exhaustive collection of environmental certifications and ratings relevant to the U.S. marketplace, but it is likely the first and most comprehensive and rigorously collected dataset of its kind. The study is also limited to the U.S. and environmental context, and its conclusions are not necessarily generalizable to other manifestations of information-based governance. Due to the absence of comparable data, the study also does not measure the amount of resources allocated to these initiatives but instead provides a binary assessment of whether each type of resource is provided to the cases in the dataset. Thus, the government sector provides resources to a relatively small number of programs, but it may nevertheless be providing a large amount of resources to those programs. The study also does not take into account reputational differences between different resource providers—resources provided by well-known organizations may have more value and provide more power than those from more obscure organizations. Future research could use both reputation-based and abundance-based metrics of resource allocation to build on the presence-based metrics used in this study.

The power resources framework itself has limitations as well. It is a relatively high-level framework that does not describe all the specific power dynamics associated with each resource. For example, the literature on patronage and clientelism shows that civil society patron–client relationships are often based on interpersonal and network relations that involve “package deals” (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980; Roniger 1994), and the patronage of information-based initiatives documented in this paper may be characterized by similar dynamics. The framework also does not take into account situations in which resource allocations may be mandated or pressured by the external environment; for example, activists may pressure or governments may require businesses to contribute resources to an information initiative. It also does not consider the internal characteristics of initiatives that are independent of the organizations behind them, such as the charisma and competence of their leadership teams. The power resource framework is therefore a useful complement to broader models that encompass the full spectrum of an organization’s characteristics, such as Meier’s (2006, 57–69) open system framework.

Despite these limitations, this study provides an important foundation and set of questions for further research on the internal dynamics of information-based environmental governance initiatives. To what extent do different forms of economic resources—donations, investments, and fees for specific services—create conflicts of interests and expectations of accountability? What different effects do implicit versus explicit forms of recognition have on such expectations? Do organizations that actively provide information (through a contract) to these initiatives have more power compared with those who provide data more passively (through a website)? To what extent does a permissive attitude toward manipulation explain these programs’ lack of transparency? To what extent are these initiatives actively manipulating their data by providing inaccurate or systematically biased information (Dowding 2011)?

Conclusion

This paper makes several important contributions to the literature on power, persuasion, and information-based governance. It develops and applies a novel method to measure different forms of sectoral power within organizations and to aggregate these measurements into an overall power “fingerprint.” This approach builds on Ilchman and Uphoff’s (1969) power resource framework and is broadly applicable to studies of power in political science—within political parties, bureaucracies, and other political contexts where decisions are influenced by a broad range of factors. Given its focus on power resources and not power itself, the power fingerprint is an imperfect metric and can be complemented by other measures of power, but it nevertheless provides useful insights into the power dynamics within organizations where formal metrics of power are difficult to measure. This approach also provides a valuable bridge between the conceptualizations of power as an ability and as a probability. As an aggregated index of a sector’s power resources being used by a particular initiative, the power fingerprint is a proxy measure of both that sector’s capacity to control the initiative and an estimated probability that the sector will be able to get the initiative to do what it wants.

The paper’s analysis of 245 cases of product and company environmental evaluations makes an important empirical contribution to our understanding of information-based governance strategies. This broad-based and first-of-its-kind investigation reveals that public sector organizations are less likely to use their power resources to control these initiatives than civil and private sector organizations. The paper also makes important theoretical contributions to our understanding of power and the resources on which it is based. It introduces the concept of the power hybrid to describe the phenomenon of the use of power resources from multiple sectors, and shows that such mixtures of power can occur both within power resources (intra-resource hybridity) and between them (inter-resource hybridity). It also uses the concept of the opacity of power to describe the lack of transparency about the organizations behind information-based environmental governance, and distinguishes between the roles of persuasion and manipulation in these programs. This paper also refines our understanding of the six primary power resources outlined by Ilchman and Uphoff (1969). Authority is defined as deriving not only from the state but also from any position that enables an actor to make or influence the day-to-day operational decisions of an organization. Two types of such authority are described and documented—direct decision-making authority and indirect authority to influence that decision-making.

This paper provides important insights for the users, designers, and regulators of information-based governance. The lack of transparency and potential for manipulation suggest that policymakers should consider mechanisms that ensure that these initiatives’ accountability relationships are revealed to the public. Such policies are necessary to improve the credibility of information-based governance strategies. This can be accomplished by mandatory disclosure laws or voluntary seals of approval that differentiate between “persuaders” and “manipulators.” The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (2012) Green Guides are a limited example of the mandatory approach while the ISEAL Alliance’s (2013) Credibility Principles are a limited example of the voluntary approach. Future research should investigate the extent to which these efforts are achieving these ends. If they are not, the power of this form of governance to persuade the public and encourage collective action may face increasing resistance, given the intricacy and opacity of its relationships with the private, civil, and public sectors. Until these concerns are addressed, the benefits of information-based strategies may be overshadowed by the uncertainties surrounding them.

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

Replication data for this article can be viewed at .

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Data collection for this project was facilitated by a People and Practices (PaPR) grant for research on the “Cultural Politics of Technology Consumption” from Intel Research.

Notes

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