Parting clouds to reveal sunlight, representing disclosure and transparency about climate emissions.
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Chapter: Institutional entrepreneurship in the creation of multistakeholder governance fields for climate change: The case of the corporate climate disclosure field

Efforts to coordinate meaningful international action on climate change have long been hindered by resistance from governments and fossil fuel companies. Nonetheless, a complex ecosystem of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and financial institutions has emerged to advance corporate accountability for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper addresses two objectives. First, it draws on theories of organizational field emergence to explore how institutional entrepreneurs can establish organizational fields aimed at mitigating climate change. Second, it examines the rise of a specific multistakeholder governance field around climate disclosure, wherein public and private organizations collaborate to compel companies to report standardized climate-related data to financial regulators and investors. Central to this emerging field are NGOs supported by financial institutions, including the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), the World Resources Institute (WRI), Ceres, and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). These organizations have developed frameworks prompting corporations to track and disclose emissions. Over time, this new field gained legitimacy as climate disclosure was integrated into global financial governance. By tracing this trajectory, this paper demonstrates how institutional entrepreneurship and multistakeholder governance converge to form new organizational fields around corporate environmental responsibility.

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About the authors

Neil Fligstein

Class of 1939 Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Sociology

Neil D. Fligstein is the Class of 1939 Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Sociology. His main research interests lie in the fields of economic sociology, organizational theory, political sociology, and the sociology of work. His research has focused on developing and using a sociological view of how new social institutions emerge, remain stable, and are transformed to study a wide variety of seemingly disparate phenomena including the history of the large American corporation and the construction of a European legal and political system.

His book with Doug McAdam, titled of A Theory of Fields (Oxford University Press, 2012), is a theoretical work that tries to combine insights from institutional theory, social movements theory, and organizational theory to create a general set of understandings of how new social spaces are constructed, maintained, and transformed. At the core of the book is a distinctly sociological view of social action based on symbolic interactionism. Fligstein and McAdam believe such a theory can prove useful to understanding strategic action by individuals and groups across a wide variety of social settings, including the organization of markets, politics of all kinds, and social movements.

Recently, Fligstein has collected a database consisting of more than 12,000 projects on behalf by governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations designed to mitigate the effects of climate change. With Janna Z. Huang, he is arguing that a new field has been created: one focused on science-based tools to make greenhouse gas emissions at the corporate level transparent. That field has come into existence as financial institutions have pushed corporations to make their greenhouse gas exposure transparent. About 2,000 companies worldwide have pledged to measure their CO2 emissions. Fligstein and Huang are interested in measuring the significance of these pledges and if they have any impact on the strategic behavior of corporations.

 

Janna Z. Huang

Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology

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