Corporations at Climate Crossroads: Multilevel Governance, Public Policy, and Global Climate Action

How corporations and governance can act together effectively in the urgent global call for climate action.

With climate risks growing, climate action facing political headwinds in many countries, and international cooperation increasingly challenged, Lily Hsueh’s Corporations at Climate Crossroads illuminates how and under what conditions the world’s largest corporations have taken proactive action on climate change during the years leading up to and after the Paris Agreement.

Drawing on insights from economics, political science, and management, the author uncovers how corporations and their leaders are key players in a nested structure of climate change governance. Hsueh shows that corporate leaders' climate actions are shaped by bottom-up and top-down institutions and incentives involving firm, regulatory, and global governance. To navigate uncertainty, corporate responses to the climate challenge are therefore an interplay of internal firm leadership, complementary capabilities in adjacent areas, and strategic and proactive engagement with regulatory process and global governance. Sophisticated large-N statistical analyses of global businesses’ climate mitigation and performance from 2011 to 2020 and illustrative company case studies substantiate the demand for, and supply of, global businesses’ climate mitigation, across sectors, and in developed and developing countries.