Open reporting platforms, like G17Eco, are potentially revolutionary because they neutralize the company-centric bias of most accounts and democratize the accounting process, allowing more scrutiny and accountability by external stakeholders beyond just shareholders, such as local communities and campaign groups. At its most radical, this approach can help stakeholders create alternative accounting systems, which companies could then be obliged to participate in and integrate into their own accountability practices.
One of the most interesting examples is in the Niger Delta, where the persistent problem of oil spills since the 1990s, caused largely by the activities of the petrochemical multinational Shell, required a new approach by local regulators. The data used by Nigerian authorities to sanction Shell for environmental and social damages was scant and often supplied by the corporate’s own monitoring programmes, making it hugely partial and selective. Shell consequently got away with under-reporting spills and avoiding the costs of clean-up for years.
So a coalition of NGOs developed a web-based ‘counter-account’, which allowed those affected by these oil spills to record when, where and what was being spilled, including images, videos and first-person testimonies of their suffering. This counter-account was highly effective and led to a partnership with the authorities to enable government agencies, oil companies, civil society groups and communities to all engage and share critical information. Now fully integrated into government regulation and rebranded as the Oil Spill Monitor (OSM), it provides open access to detailed accounts of the cause, timing, location, quantity and remediation of every single oil spill in the Niger Delta. Most importantly, it gives everyone affected a chance to give their accounts of the impacts, including local people whose voices would normally go unheard and whose lives have been blighted by disease caused by polluted farmland, fish, drinking water and air.
By capturing all the stakeholders in the region, not only did OSM equip the Nigerian authorities with a more complete range of data to hold Shell to account, but it also allowed local communities and NGOs to audit, verify and challenge the authorities and their official accounts, too. Undercover filming by Amnesty International found the Nigerian authorities’ oil spill investigation teams to be under the control of Shell, bribing locals to lie about pipe leakages being caused by oil thieves’ sabotage. Shell eventually paid £55 million in compensation in 2015 for deliberately minimizing its oil spill assessments after losing a court case led by the human rights charity. And in 2021, a Dutch court found Shell Nigeria liable for damage caused by oil leaks and ordered them to pay compensation to farmers and install equipment to prevent future damage, ruling that they had a duty of care to the communities wherever they operated.
What the OSM illustrates so vividly is how powerful accounting can be in the way it helps represent events that have happened and leads to material changes in the present. All those various stakeholders in the Niger Delta helped to construct an account of the past that could be used to influence future decision-making and governance at a distance – whether Shell’s management at their headquarters in The Hague or the high court judges in London and the Netherlands who heard Amnesty International’s court case. Far from being dull and inert documents, accounts can bring to life the past actions of a company, the specific impacts it has had and the people who were there to see them. As such, they’re an essential tool for NGOs to lobby governments, shareholders to protest against company executives at AGMs and communities to engage with businesses on issues that are often many miles and many years away.