Is the Power of Brand-Focused Activism Rising? The Case of Tropical Deforestation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Four trends would seem to be empowering environmentalists who target corporations with global brands: the increasing reach of social media, growing numbers of campaigns, the corporate turn toward “sustainability” to create brand value and manage supply chains, and the spread of eco-consumerism. Campaigns since 2007 to demand that brands stop buying palm oil linked to tropical deforestation confirm the rising influence over corporate policies and market demand. Many activists are portraying the outcomes as “victories” toward saving rainforests. Yet, three factors are limiting the value for improving on-the-ground management: industry influence over, and governance limits of, palm oil certification; ongoing sales of uncertified palm oil as demand shifts to nonbrand buyers; and illegalities and weak regulatory enforcement in producer countries, notably Indonesia and Malaysia. Theoretically, this analysis demonstrates the importance, when evaluating activist campaigns, of distinguishing between the influence on corporate policies and markets and the effectiveness for environmental outcomes.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it