What should we make of the current furore over India’s participation in the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games?
LOCOG – The London Games Organising Committee – agreed this summer a £7 million deal with Dow Chemical to provide a decorative polyester and polyethylene ‘wrap’ for the Olympic stadium.

Dow Chemical company to produce London Olympic wrap
In India, this has caused an outcry amongst politicians and campaign groups.
Dow now owns Union Carbide, responsible for the 1984 Bhopal toxic gas disaster,
and is involved in ongoing disputes over toxic clean-up and the extent of
financial compensation to the victims. Dow refuses liability for further claims
relating to the disaster, which has killed at least 20,000 people, injured hundreds
of thousands more, and has left a long term legacy of human and environmental
health problems, of birth defects and cancers.
Dow is, since last year, a core Olympic sponsor, the IOC’s ‘official
chemistry company’. But the wrap deal is a separate agreement – and one
which, according to Amnesty International, gives
Dow a visibility and legitimacy which is “untenable in the face of its
continuing failure to address one of the worse corporate related human rights
disasters of the 20th century”, whilst it “risks delegitimizing the long
standing calls of Bhopal survivors and other human rights groups for corporate
accountability and redress for human rights abuses”.
In the light of the deal, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Chief Minister of the
state of Madhya Pradesh, where Bhopal is located, has urged an official Indian boycott of the
Games. This seemed unlikely, once the acting
president of the Indian Olympic Association, Vijay Kumar Malhotra Malhotra
reportedly ruled
out a boycott. But over the last week, there has been a
hardening of India’s stance: the Indian government has now asked the IOA to
write to LOCOG to request Dow be dropped as a London 2012 sponsor. A boycott
remains on the agenda.
For once, LOCOG has lost
its grip over the control of the course of events, and seems in shock. After
all, the Dow deal is good business. The time
of boycotts, which so ravaged the Olympic movement in the 1970s and 1980s, was
meant to be over. The Games are now supposed to be about human rights,
about global citizenship, and, since the Los Angeles Games, stimulating
corporate investment, creating new markets, generating wealth.
The Dow dispute looks like a potent clash of the old Games – the Games of
politics and nations – with the new Games of markets and rights. But the
dispute also tells us more about another aspect of the Games that London is
promising us. LOCOG arrived at the agreement with Dow because, in its own
procurement terms, what Dow was offering was unimpeachably ‘sustainable’. How
is it possible that LOCOG got the public mood so wrong? What does it tell us
about what sustainability means to the London Games?
From the start, London 2012 made two bold promises: that it would place
environmental sustainability at the heart of the design and organisation of the
Games, so that, in the words of Sir David Higgins, then CEO of the Olympic Development
Authority, it would be “remembered not only as two weeks of fantastic
sporting action, but also as the ‘Greenest Games’ in modern times”.
It also promised that sustainability would be taken to be “fundamentally about people and how we live;
it is not simply a technical discipline”. (For LOCOG’s head of sustainability David Stubbs, answering questions
in a live Guardian webchat earlier this year, “our story is very much about people and the
choices we have made to influence wider change”.
Sustainability is, of course, a slippery concept, which is why politicians,
private enterprises, and event organisers like it so much. But London made a
commitment, and on the first of its promises it has done pretty well: its
carbon accounting methodology, for example, deserves to be taken seriously.
The second promise, however, is harder to keep. It’s all very well to say that
the Olympics will be “about people and how we live” but what does this
mean, in sustainability terms? In the case of the Dow wrap, it’s clear that
sustainability is fundamentally about three things: about money, about
materials, and about reputation.
Money, because the ongoing systemic crisis of neo-liberalism has called for
savings even here, and the Dow sponsorship deal – “a small procurement”
according to LOCOG CEO Paul Deighton, answering questions before a House of
Commons select committee last week (the uncorrected record is available here) is a neat piece of business designed to plug the gap caused by the
withdrawal of the public funding originally set aside for the stadium fabric.
Materials, because sustainable sourcing turns out here essentially to mean, as
Lord Coe put it before the select committee, that “the material they are using is entirely
recyclable”, whilst the wrap is
promised to have a lower carbon footprint than conventional plastics. The fact
that the IOC even has a ‘chemicals partner’, amongst the usual transnational
corporation suspects — airlines, fast food, beer, sportswear, financial
services — shows how important this has become to Olympic image-making.
And reputation, because this is London 2012’s basic worst nightmare: not just a
boycott, not just the loss of a huge media market, but an indelible stain on
London’s claims to global environmental leadership.
In other words, what sustainability turns out not to be about after all is
‘people’, at least in any sense which sees them as something other than
consumers or spectators or supporters. LOCOG speaks the language of social and
ethnic representation, and does it well, endlessly measuring and encouraging
and enabling in turn. But what it doesn’t speak is the language of
participation as active citizenship, of democratic participation in
decision-making.
This isn’t new: after all, volunteer training has been contracted to
McDonald’s, showing that when it
comes down to it, volunteering is about efficient service delivery, corporate
branding, and Olympic sponsorship rights – when it could have been about so
much more.
And to be fair, how could it? LOCOG has an event to organise, and for London’s
reputation as for the watching billions it is important that, above all, nothing goes wrong. This is a top-down
process – and there’s the rub.
One might see the Dow dispute as a sideshow: Olympics have direct, material,
spatial impacts, on local populations as on the environment. London 2012
conceives of sustainable development within this framework: costs are measured
against benefits, impacts are remediated by developing best practice in
processes and technology. Recycling is important, as is the development of
sustainable materials.
But the Dow dispute shows us how this conception of sustainable development is
the product of a depoliticised, managerial, growth-oriented mindset. Even
whilst it is fighting political battles with suppliers and departments to
improve practices, London 2012 has effectively become the victim of its
attempts to evacuate politics from what are fundamentally political choices.
The threat of a boycott is the moment when nations and place come into conflict
with capital and flows, and where people – with their histories, their
memories, and their collective values – remind us that sustainability isn’t
just about technical standards and targets: it is about how we live and build a
society together. It is therefore about ideas, it is about conflict, and it is about
the past as well as the future.
If LOCOG is in difficulty now, it's because it has failed to understand that
sustainable development is not simply about delivery. In Bhopal, it's about
justice.
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