Book chapter "Institutional Entrepreneurship and Climate Change"

Abstract

Private regulatory systems, including voluntary efforts by firms to restrain their own behaviour, were by the early 2020s the primary form of global climate change governance. However, when environmental challenges first appeared during the 1970s, the initial emphasis was on government regulation. This chapter investigates the privatisation of global environmental governance and shows how private regulation was established before climate change became a priority issue. We track how two separate paths merged. The first was the growth of certification schemes that gave emergent categories such as organic food, green buildings, and sustainable investment definitions and legitimacy. Policymakers had no interest in, or positively disliked, these. Institutional entrepreneurs, drawn from outside big business and, in some cases, hostile to it, built institutions to confer environmental credibility and legitimacy. The second path was the growing engagement of business pressure groups with United Nations environmental agencies. Institutional entrepreneurs influenced arguments and concepts around business self-regulation. These paths merged from the 1990s. So, as societal pressures for businesses to act on the environment grew louder, greenwashing, green-hushing, and transition washing spread throughout the ecosystem.

This is part of the projetct International business in global environmental governance between Stockholm and Kyoto (Swedish Research Council)