McDonald's and the Environmental Defense Fund: A Case Study of a Green Alliance

Abstract

Much green business literature, both academic and practitioner-oriented, views alliances between business and ecology groups as exemplifying a paradigm shift from command and control to a new kind of environmental practice, market environmentalism, and privileges the latter. This privileging occurs despite the claim made by the Environmental Defense Fund's (EDF) leader Fred Krupp, one of the early proponents of market environmentalism, that the new form supplements—rather than replaces-command and control. This paper, a case study, examines the public discourse of one such alliance between McDonald's and EDF. Rather than indicating a paradigm shift, the analysis shows that both partners drew, and had to draw, not only from the emerging discourse of market environmentalism, but also from the older, and purportedly displaced, paradigm of command and control. This rhetorical ambivalence is emblematic of a larger discursive struggle, namely, the contemporaneous socio-political conflict over how the ecological crisis was to be defined and what should constitute legitimate practice-by business, government and environmentalists-in its name. In my view, the McDonald's-EDF partnership was at once constrained by this discursive struggle over the environment and a constitutive element in the struggle itself.