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Year:: 2022
Contributor:: Lowden, Finnian M. (creator); Levitas, Anthony (thesis advisor); Roberts, Timmons (reader); Wetts, Rachel (reader); Brown University. Public Policy (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Nonprofit organizations; Charities; oil companies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/6hb8-fa81

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Abstract:: Since the 1920s, corporations have used their surplus revenues to fund foundations and support nonprofits. Their efforts gradually grew more “strategic” as they realized their philanthropy could dually improve their relationships with surrounding communities and boost their profits. This movement toward a more strategic philanthropy prompted my research into the relationship between oil companies and environmental nonprofits. I led the building of a text database that includes 316 annual reports published by 12 environmental nonprofits between 1980 and 2020 and a corporate giving database that consists of 74,929 donations made by ExxonMobil and Shell Oil to 11,930 organizations. I then use dictionary content analysis methods to measure the frequency of climate delay rhetoric in these texts and use this novel data to create a predictive model that relates the prevalence of delay rhetoric to the amount of funding received by a nonprofit. I find that an increased prevalence of technical and business-friendly rhetoric often coincides with larger donations being allocated to a receiving organization.
Notes:: Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2022; Concentration: Public Policy

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Use and Reproduction: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Rights: In Copyright

Citation

Lowden, Finnian M., "Oil Companies and Environmental Nonprofits’ Unlikely Partnership: A Large-scale Text Analysis of Climate Delay Rhetoric in Environmental Nonprofit Discourse" (2022). The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/6hb8-fa81

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The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs department.
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Oil Companies and Environmental Nonprofits’ Unlikely Partnership: A Large-scale Text Analysis of Climate Delay Rhetoric in Environmental Nonprofit Discourse