The time is ripe for enlightened business leaders to scale up corporate sustainability by engaging responsibly on climate policy.

Georg Kell, Executive Director, United Nations Global Compact

Introduction

In June 2012, more than 2,000 corporate leaders and investors, government officials, representatives of non-governmental organizations, and academic observers gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the site of the United Nations Rio +20 Conference on Sustainable Development. They were there to attend a side event, “Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum: Innovation & Collaboration for the Future We Want.” Attendees dined on local delicacies, gathered in anterooms to network, and shared stories in conference halls as they celebrated past successes and made plans for future efforts. The event was the latest in a 10+ year history in which the United Nations, having long been unsuccessful in convincing its stakeholders to formally engage with the private sector (Tesner & Kell, 2000), has harnessed the economic and political power of transnational corporations to address critical global challenges such as poverty, inequality, and climate change through the agency of its trisector partnership, the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC).

The Rio + 20 summit attracted 30,000 participants, many more than the UNGC side event, and included heads of state, whose representatives spent long hours negotiating a declaration on sustainable development, “The Future We Want.” The overarching message of both events was that the private sector should play an increasingly prominent role in making progress on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals¹ (Kettunen & ten Brink, 2012), and in addressing the impacts of climate change.

But many UNGC members present in Rio, corporate environmental leaders all, recognized that a global, government-supported climate change policy was a long shot. Given that the Rio sustainable development event coincided with the 2012 expiration of the Kyoto protocol, which had placed caps on greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries, businesses were understandably keen to address the uncertainty ahead (Engau & Hoffman, 2009). While a number of countries and subnational governments had made progress on constructing policies to combat climate change, the most notable being the 2005 European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme, a global movement to enact climate change policy was unlikely. And, every day that policies were not in place, the effects of climate change were more evident. Motivated by images of glaciers receding, communities coping with sea level rise, and the increasing occurrence of severe droughts, and armed with knowledge of the impacts these events would have on global economic security, members of the UNGC initiated a concerted effort to promote global climate change policy.

These members’ efforts were acts of environmental leadership. These actions were not those of the kind of leadership in which heads of state or heads of corporations exercise formal power and deign that particular actions will be taken, but rather committed partnerships with like-minded others engaged in joint problem solving. The existential global climate crisis motivated members to consider innovative approaches to leadership, in which personal, titular power would not be the sole source of change. These exercises of environmental leadership that occurred post-Rio were not sustained by personal charisma, motivated by desires to transform organizational relationships, or rooted in visions of heroic actions, but rather grounded in a sense that humility and collaboration are critical to the survival of the planet.

This chapter details the efforts of UNGC members to perform collaborative environmental leadership and engage in climate policy development at the global level under the auspices of the UNGC’s Caring for Climate (C4C) platform. The findings and analysis are informed by participant observation and ethnographic methods (Spradley, 2016) in which the researcher immerses herself in an organizational setting to discern connections between individual member performances and the development and practice of organizational norms (Van Maanen, 1979). In this study, the author attended a series of United Nations Global Compact meetings from 2013–2015, interacting with attendees at Caring for Climate gatherings to uncover the ways in which environmental leadership practice evolved and to knit together a working theory of collaborative environmental leadership. The chapter begins with an overview of the history and structure of the United Nations Global Compact as a transnational public private partnership and agent of environmental leadership. The Caring for Climate platform is then detailed. This sets the stage for a larger consideration of how UNGC members engaged collaboratively in two C4C initiatives, Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy and Carbon Pricing Leadership, and were instrumental in facilitating the landmark 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

The United Nations Global Compact: Transnational Public–Private Partnership

Private sector organizations have long partnered with public sector agencies and non-governmental organizations to address problems of common concern, such as response to natural disasters, support for education and the arts, and limited access to food and nutrition. Opportunities to engage in these issues through private philanthropy abound. However, multinational corporations motivated to confront problems like global climate change increasingly engage as active members of transnational public private partnerships (TPPPs). TPPPs are broadly defined as “multisectoral networks that bring together government, business and civil society … as institutionalized transboundary interactions between public and private actors, which aim at the provision of collective goods” (Benner et al., 2005, as cited in Bäckstrand et al., 2012, p. 126). Corporate partners in TPPPs derive legitimacy by participating in joint problem solving and in the construction of procedural norms to address critical issues. By the same token, TPPPs such as the UNGC have long derived legitimacy for the project of creating a global green economy by focusing on market-oriented, business-based solutions to issues such as climate change and biodiversity protection. In this chapter, such a search for legitimacy within the marketplace is called into question as we consider opportunities for collaborative leadership.

Historically, multinational corporations participating in TPPPs have been motivated to more concretely fulfill responsibilities as global citizens and to learn new ways of functioning in a global society in which lines between sectors are increasingly blurred (Bromley & Meyer, 2014; Waddock, 2013). Members of TPPPs such as the UNGC work together to activate shared processes of organizational learning (Ruggie, 2002). Partnerships such as the UNGC, which place attention on addressing critical environmental problems, avail member companies with opportunities to enact leadership behaviors and influence global environmental policy change (Gallagher, 2013).

The United Nations Global Compact: Platform for Environmental Leadership

The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development declared, “The right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations,” but did not lay out a specific role for private sector organizations to play. Recognizing this oversight, in 1999 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called on private sector organizations “Individually through your firms, and collectively through your business associations – to embrace, support and enact a set of core values in the areas of human rights, labour standards, and environmental practices” (United Nations, 1999). This plea ultimately resulted in the creation of the UNGC as a network of leaders from business, non-governmental organizations, and labor organizations ostensibly focused on promoting a mission to spur sustainable development, educating each other about best practices, and on partnering to benefit the greater good.

Since 1999, the UNGC has increased its membership significantly via global marketing and direct outreach through the establishment of in-country and regional local networks. Local networks provide opportunities for members to participate in activism at ground level, for example by providing training to non-member companies on best practices in environmental stewardship or fair labor practices. The UNGC has employed increasingly sophisticated tools to gather information about best practices in combatting corruption, empowering women, alleviating poverty, managing water resources, protecting biodiversity, and adapting to the impacts of global climate change, and to disseminate this information around the globe.

UNGC members regularly gather in issue-oriented summits, local network meetings, global conferences, and webinars to share information on best practices and learn from each other. Compact members are encouraged to affiliate with initiatives that align with the UNGC’s key themes of human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption. Members join and lead campaigns that address critical issues relevant to their organizations. For example, members may participate in the UNGC’s Global Business Initiative on Human Rights (GBI), which offers opportunities to develop tools for integrating human rights into business practices and to join a global dialog on best practices. Alternatively, they may engage in an online “dilemmas” forum in which members discuss challenges and offer company case studies of how challenges were confronted.

Members are required to report each year on activities in service of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In annual communications on progress (COPs), UNGC member organizations must publicly disclose the progress made in both implementing the UNGC’s ten principles² and in addressing the SDGs.³ Failure to provide COPs results in termination of membership. While there are currently over 12,000 UNGC members in good standing, free-riding has long been a concern – annually the number of members terminated runs into the hundreds.

In the environmental arena, critical issues such as biodiversity, water resources, and climate change are addressed by UNGC members who participate in initiatives that offer opportunities for them to engage directly with one another under the guidance of UNGC professional staff. UNGC initiatives such as “Corporate Action on Biodiversity,” “CEO Water Mandate,” and “Caring for Climate” provide platforms for members to become involved in addressing these issues. However, while formal affiliation with specific environmental initiatives, evidenced by the number of signatory companies, generally runs into the hundreds on each initiative, in reality a small group of members actively work to advance corporate perspectives on responsible environmental behavior. As will be described below, these members are leaders who engage in non-traditional, post-heroic leadership practices such as working across organizational borders and transparently sharing information about organizational practices with a broad swath of stakeholders.

Caring for Climate

The Caring for Climate (C4C) Initiative was unveiled at the annual UNGC members meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2007. At the launch, 153 companies pledged to take

… practical actions to increase the efficiency of energy usage and to reduce the carbon burden of products, services and processes, to set voluntary targets for doing so, and to report publicly on the achievement of those targets annually [… and participate in] urgent creation, in close consultation with the business community and civil society, of comprehensive, long-term and effective legislative and fiscal frameworks designed to make markets work for the climate, in particular policies and mechanisms intended to create a stable price for carbon.

(United Nations Global Compact, 2007, p. 27)

Signatories also committed to dealing with the climate issue strategically and to building relevant capacity. They pledged to work collaboratively with other enterprises on a sector basis and along their global supply chains, promoting recognized standards and taking joint initiatives to reduce climate risks.

C4C offers its over 300 members from 60+ countries opportunities to “advance practical solutions, share experiences, inform public policy as well as shape public attitudes” on climate change. Members collaborate to tackle the impacts of climate change through several work streams – climate and development, sustainable energy for all, low carbon solutions, and transparency and disclosure. Before members are cleared to participate in C4C and its initiatives, firm CEOs must sign on to the “Caring for Climate Business Leadership Platform,” a carefully negotiated and tightly crafted manifesto. The platform 1) declares that climate change is a critical global issue that requires actions by business, governments, and citizens, and further that the private sector must lead through energy efficiency, reduced emissions, and use of low-carbon technologies; 2) requires a commitment to specific actions, such as carbon-footprint-reduction target-setting, reporting on progress, capacity building, policy advocacy, setting standards in the production value chain, and serving as champions for climate action; and 3) declares that governments must work with the private sector to develop both legal and economic frameworks that focus on market-based policies and mechanisms aimed at constituting a global price for carbon, acknowledges that public-private partnerships are critical, and finally that “vigorous international cooperation” is required to support the private sector in investing in a low-carbon global economy (United Nations Global Compact, 2010).

In addition to signing the platform, members must report annually on progress in addressing climate change challenges, using the UNGC’s Commitment on Progress, “COP-Climate” mechanism. The COP-Climate specifies that participants must declare continued support for the C4C initiative, describe actions, policies, and procedures taken to address each of the components of C4C, establish annual greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and report actual reductions using frameworks such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) or the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).⁴ In the long run up to the 21st United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in Paris, C4C was one of the most prolific UNGC member initiatives. Two C4C initiatives, Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy and Carbon Pricing Leadership, described below, provided opportunities for members to engage in collaborative environmental leadership.

Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy

Much of the UNGC’s Rio+20 side event agenda was focused on promoting the “global green economy,” reflecting an optimism that such a focus would both create economic benefits to participants and mitigate the impacts of climate change. The global green economy discourse (Wanner, 2015), which promotes a neoliberal capitalist agenda to solve critical environmental problems, was in evidence throughout the meeting venue. For example, participants provided examples of practice in renewable energy and offered specific high-impact opportunity commitments to promote further progress in energy efficiency. The new “Sustainable Energy for All”⁵ initiative was highlighted. Under this platform, UNGC member firms made tangible commitments to collaborate on practical solutions and support sustainable energy financing to double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency by 2030. Expressed motivations for efficiency projects were notable in that they focused both on opportunities to address climate change and on providing prospects for the development of new markets and ensuring competition.

It should be noted that such a neoliberal approach, one singularly focused on markets as saviors of the Earth, is not without its critics. Some attendees at the Rio conference, most notably those from less developed countries in the global South and environmental non-governmental organizations unaffiliated with market-based solutions, began to cry foul. These critics were largely concerned about the dominance of corporations and markets in crafting solutions to climate change. A main target of these critiques was a type of policy described as “payments for ecosystem services (PES).” Under these policies, the market value of nature’s services, such as forests, which take in carbon emissions, and wetlands, which purify water resources, would be estimated. Holders of these resources would be paid to protect them, thus creating new markets for ecosystem services, with attendant winners and losers.⁶ While much of the criticism of PES was leveled at economists working to set up such markets (Kosoy & Corbera, 2010), a second critique focused broadly on leadership issues, worried that those intended to receive payments to conserve would not be treated fairly if they did not have a place at the negotiating table (Shapiro-Garza, 2013).

Nevertheless, support for a global green economy perspective to mitigate climate change continued to build in formal sessions. However, even as this approach moved “full steam ahead,” a new collective discourse began to emerge in hallway conversations. UNGC members, affiliated researchers and staff began to consider whether a singular focus on climate change mitigation through the establishment of markets was ill-placed and that a new effort focused on promoting proactive public policies on climate would be more productive to address the “super wicked”⁷ problem of climate change. These conversations led to the creation of a new UNGC member initiative, Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy (RCECP).

Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy: Collective Policy Leadership

Leaders of corporations hold that regulatory uncertainty presents a significant challenge to the development of effective strategy (Engau & Hoffman, 2011). Further, scholars note that when uncertainty is minimized by regulations, business response can be a source of competitive advantage through a process of innovation and institutionalization of industry compliance norms (Jaffe et al., 1995). Thus, for some firms, corporate engagement in policy development is seen as an important and effective strategy to guard against the risks of regulatory uncertainty (Hadani & Schuler, 2013). From this perspective, and fueled by a desire to make a difference in the fight against global climate change, UNGC staff and a select group of members launched RCECP in 2014. Their efforts were bolstered by the knowledge that only 62 percent of C4C’s 350 members fulfilled their membership obligations as described in Caring for Climate’s constitution, to “engage more actively with … national governments, intergovernmental organizations and civil society to develop policies and measures to provide an enabling framework for business to contribute effectively to building a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy” (C4C, 2011).

The initiative comprised three phases: research into best practices in policy engagement, development of a generalizable engagement model, and development of case studies of best practices. UNGC members who participated in RCECP worked collectively with UNGC staff and researchers to design a process for companies to lobby for public policies that would slow the pace of global climate change and hasten global policy action to address the issue. As researchers reviewed the literature on procedures and ethics of policy engagement to develop the engagement model, RCECP leadership committee members reached into their firms to test components of the model.

The engagement model directed organizations to first connect with internal and external stakeholder experts to assist in naming company activities, including investments, which could both directly and indirectly influence climate policy and the opportunities and risks of these actions. For example, companies were encouraged to develop an inventory of trade associations or professional membership organizations in which positional company leaders and other employees may have encountered and participated in climate policy discussions and served as company spokespersons. The model then directed companies to audit their engagement activities and messages and flush out spaces within the organization in which a climate change policy message was not aligned with the overall message that company leaders desired to communicate. This step emphasized the need for corporations to focus on accountability and consistency of policy engagement practices across their organizations.

Many RCECP members found that a uniform and deliberate message was not being communicated, and that in some cases employees were acting as unofficial company spokespersons without truly understanding the company’s official climate change policy position. Companies with extensive, global supply chain and product delivery networks, and those that employ myriad professionals from multiple disciplines such as finance, engineering, and marketing, found themselves most at risk from dissonant messaging. This is not surprising, as employees’ identities and environmental values are not only tied to the organizations they work for, but also to the professions they affiliate with (Gallagher, 2007), which makes carving out a consistent message on climate change policy sometimes difficult to do. The RCECP participants described taking on this step as challenging but necessary, recognizing that environmental policy leadership requires all organizational spokespersons, regardless of position, to speak with one voice.

Finally, in the third step, company leaders developed a clear message and outlined procedures and processes to transparently communicate that message. A key component of this last step would be to report on progress toward addressing the organization’s impacts on climate change (identified in the first step) and to publicly disclose climate policy positions. For RCECP leadership companies this step was complicated – multiple platforms are used to communicate corporate engagement in climate policy, from the UNGC’s annual Communications on Progress and Carbon Disclosure Project⁸ submissions to annual sustainability reports on company websites. Isolating a clear and consistent message on climate policy and wrangling data from disparate sources and platforms served to be a considerable challenge for many. However, most members reported it to be a valuable learning experience for all involved.

While a select group of RCECP leadership team members shared data on their firms’ practices to inform the model and to develop case studies, it was necessary to reach a broader audience of UNGC members and stakeholders to catalyze extensive corporate engagement in climate policy. Thus, a series of meetings was held to test the draft model with a larger group of UNGC members and other stakeholders and to make modifications where needed. Various scenarios in which companies implemented the model were shared with attendees who offered feedback. Results of these interactions served to refine the model and provide larger context for a guidebook (United Nations Global Compact, 2013) intended to inspire UNGC members to engage in climate policy development and share their experiences.

The UNGC held its inaugural Business Forum at the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP 19) in Warsaw, Poland, with the overall objective of supporting partnerships for collaboration between business leaders and global policy makers. The RCECP guidebook was formally launched at COP 19, and lessons about how to responsibly engage in climate change policy were put into action there. For the first time, UNGC members acting as representatives of the Caring for Climate platform participated in direct talks with policy makers geared toward finding climate change solutions. This was an important step in the lead-up to the Paris negotiations, in which a global climate change framework was anticipated.

As Christiana Figueres, then the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), described it, this face-to face meeting of businesses and negotiators would “create the political space for more ambition in the UN climate process, which as part of a virtuous cycle can in turn catalyze more business action.” She noted that on climate change, “all the bad guys are totally joined up” and that “everybody knows that governments are listening to the private sector.” Before gathering to participate in the formal COP negotiations, company leaders described the need to “work together to get the policy right,” and to “draw the conversations out of the shadows.”⁹ Members recognized that further work would have to be done to close the messaging gap between corporate executive suites and operational units. They noted that this would require additional leadership actions on the part of business professionals, who needed to “go inside the trade associations” and engage on the climate change issue, to exercise the “right to membership privileges and power.” One member compelled others to engage, saying, “We need all businesses to participate. There is a ‘silent majority’ of businesses who are in agreement [on climate change].” UNGC members and C4C participants described their experience at the Warsaw COP 19 as critical and “game-changing,” enabling businesses to articulate a more long-term perspective on climate action. In Warsaw, UN Global Compact members expressed a responsibility to backstop national political leaders who “need to sell a future for their society rather than the fear of the unknown” by moving from “climate negotiations to climate collaboration.”¹⁰

RCECP participants’ leadership behaviors focused on engaging in the challenging work of diagnosing organizational consistency problems and coming up with solutions to facilitate the communication of a concise, honest, and transparent policy perspective. As the first step in the engagement process called on leaders to audit organizational climate change messaging, which uncovered unwanted truths, leaders needed to be prepared to confront those within the organization who were not communicating shared values. These actions necessarily required leadership practice to be deeply embedded within the organization to serve a project of mutual meaning-making (Raelin, 2016). It required both formal and positional as well as informal and marginal leaders at multiple levels and organizational roles to expose “dirty laundry.” It also required them to collaborate to carefully craft an organization-wide policy message that could be used in service of a greater good – to advocate for forward-thinking climate change policies. As described below, the final phase of the collaborative leadership effort, linking with others who had engaged in similar internal organizational journeys to publicly communicate a convincing message to global policy makers, took place in Paris at the 21st Conference of the Parties.

Carbon Pricing Leadership: Collaborative Policy Engagement on a Global Stage

Once the corporate climate policy engagement model was built, validated by participants, and piloted at COP 19 in Warsaw, UNGC members, researchers and staff embarked on a journey to put the model into practice on a larger scale. It was agreed that corporate engagement in climate policy up to and during the 21st Conference of the Parties in Paris, at which the global community hoped to reach a landmark climate accord, would be an important and invaluable positive influence on policy makers. The UN Global Compact catalyzed engagement around a single mission – to mobilize members to serve as Carbon Pricing Leaders (CPL). The goal was to recruit members to provide testimony on how they had initiated a price for carbon on activities within their organizations. These testimonies were intended to provide cover for policy makers who sought to develop a global price on carbon,¹¹ and had often been met with resistance from others who parroted the adage that climate change policies were opposed by business.

To ensure successful implementation of the carbon pricing leadership initiative, during the course of the two years between the Warsaw COP and the Paris COP, UNGC staff and researchers focused on three efforts: conducting a survey of leaders of member organizations, interviewing individual leaders, and benchmarking best practices.¹² In the survey, UNGC members were queried to gauge overall support for a global price on carbon and to understand company motivations for implementing an internal price on carbon.¹³ Unfortunately, the survey was poorly designed and results were descriptive at best. Many respondents used the survey as an opportunity to share opinions, boast about environmental stewardship accomplishments both related and unrelated to climate policy, and to vent about existing regional, national, and subnational climate policies and regulations, rather than to offer useful data on interest and motivations for implementing global climate policies.

The second and third phases of pre-Paris research were more effective. Approximately 30 environmental leaders from companies identified as having implemented internal carbon pricing policies participated in lengthy interviews with staff and researchers. Information about the nature of their programs, how they were developed, leadership actions taken to support and encourage organizational acceptance and uptake, and impacts on the organization’s carbon emissions was gathered. Leaders described lengthy processes both from the ground up designing the technical components of the programs, and from the top down catalyzing their use. Programs ranged from the implementation of highly technical and closely specified prices based on years of engineering and financial analyses, to rule-of-thumb prices offered as experiments in institution-building. Uptake was highly dependent on leadership messaging and internal collaboration structures. For example, companies that involved a larger range of organizational units in developing the pricing schemes quickly noted high levels of acceptance, as did companies whose top leadership were strong advocates. Overall, once pricing schemes became organizational norms, employees largely became advocates.

In parallel with conducting in-depth interviews, researchers developed benchmarking case studies to highlight challenges and offer pathways to successful implementation. For example, Statoil, an oil and gas producer based in Norway, developed a shadow price on carbon, which has been used to assess investments in technology. Alternatively, Microsoft, the US-based computer software company, implemented a small fee on carbon that was used to fund investment in research and development of carbon reduction technologies and renewable energy projects. Interview data and benchmarking information was shared in webinars and used to develop a guide for businesses seeking to engage as a carbon pricing leader in Paris and beyond (United Nations Global Compact, 2015).

By November 2015, prior to the Paris climate meeting, at least 65 businesses had aligned with the UNGC’s leadership criteria on climate action by: 1) setting an internal price on carbon significant enough to drive decreases in greenhouse gas emissions, 2) publicly advocating the need for carbon pricing, and 3) transparently reporting on progress. Many had also joined the World Bank Group’s Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition.¹⁴ These companies were among the over 400 representatives of businesses, governments, and civil society organizations who attended the UNGC’s third Caring for Climate Business Forum in Paris in December 2015. Company positional leaders who committed to speaking publicly at the Forum (after all, a UN event on a global stage requires diplomacy undergirded by formal power and influence) provided motivation to others and offered examples of climate policy advocacy and internal initiatives. They also implored others to join their collaboration. For example, John Woolard, Vice President of Energy for Google, offered that, “we hope that other companies join in. We need this to become a much more forceful and formidable movement.” Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, went further, saying, “As CEOs we understand the important signals that are sent when climate leadership comes from the very, very top. Together we are committing to providing that leadership.” But it was not lost on the attendees and hopefully will not be on future readers of UNGC guidebooks that not only positional leaders were involved in these collaborative leadership efforts. Much of the collaborative work was performed by employees without formal corporate leadership designations, but with critical knowledge of how things work and the motivation to make a difference.

Attendees of the Forum learned about responsible engagement in climate policy and how their individual and collective actions could contribute to national commitments on climate action, or Intended Nationally Determined Commitments (INDCs).¹⁵ They discussed additional strategies to use in enacting collaborative leadership, such as setting science-based targets on greenhouse gas reductions, using big data on climate change to influence policy makers, calling for increased investments in renewable energy, implementing climate change adaptation strategies, and participating in UNGC Local Network efforts to hasten climate change action at the local level. In a subsequent meeting, carbon pricing leaders and others met in the official negotiation venue. The UN Secretary General, US Secretary of State, France Minister of Ecology Sustainable Development and Energy, and Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change listened as business leaders announced their actions and commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and work within supply chains and described their experiences as members of the RCECP and CPL initiatives. An interactive discussion followed in which participants and dignitaries considered the relationship between a right price for carbon and the realization of INDCs and actions which could be taken to support global adoption of a price on carbon.

The leadership challenge for those who participated in the CPL initiative was focused on moving beyond internal transformations to engage in external outreach in service of a lofty goal – the curation and delivery of inspirational messages about business commitments to climate action. They worked in the frame of pluralized leadership (Denis et al., 2012), in which multiple leaders pool formal and informal influence structures to advance extra-organizational goals. These carbon pricing leaders worked together across organizational boundaries to develop clear messages of support for future-looking climate policies.

Lessons from Caring for Climate: Informing a Theory of Collaborative Leadership

United Nations Global Compact members participating in the Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy and Carbon Pricing Leadership initiatives worked beyond structural borders to engage in collective action with like-minded leaders in other organizations; they created innovative paths to exercise collaborative environmental leadership. While these leaders were informed by experiences and perspectives based in their home organizations, they were freed from those organizations to engage in collaborative work in the fight to address climate change.

UNGC member company leaders that participated in both Caring for Climate initiatives – RCECP and CPL – were engaged in a three-step process of first grounding and then untethering organization-based environmental actions, followed by linking with those participating in the collaboration to define an expanded sense of purpose. The first two steps, grounding and untethering, are critical to the practice of collaborative environmental leadership. Leaders were grounded in a sense of the environmental mission and the organizational challenge, in this case using business resources to address the wicked problem of climate change, but then became untethered from the organization so that they were free to join with others and act collectively as boundary spanners (Tushman & Scanlan, 1981).

In global organizations facing the impacts of climate change, such as those of the C4C participants, boundary spanners play a critical role in bringing knowledge from the external environment into the internal workings of the firm. That knowledge is used to alter practices within the organization. In this case, learnings from participation in the RCECP initiative enabled leaders to audit and align climate change messaging and focus on consistent, cross-organization external communication. But, in a departure from traditional practice, these boundary-spanning leaders did not remain organization-bound. Once they transferred and translated knowledge from the external environment and used it to transform the organization (Carlile, 2004), they turned their attention to problems beyond their organization. They became “untethered.” They deployed their enlightened firms’ resources in service of the existential challenge of climate change and linked with like-minded leaders of other global businesses as members of the CPL initiative.

Collaborative environmental leadership is post-heroic leadership. It is not the practice of a unitary empowered, titular leader at the top of an organizational structure. It is performed in stark contrast to transformational leadership that is mostly organization-bound and hierarchal in nature. Collaborative environmental leadership is performed by a collective of leaders, both positional and ad hoc, in service of the greater good, rather than in service of a single organization and its stakeholders. Collaborative environmental leadership, the process of grounding, untethering, and linking, is critically important, as Paul Polman, Unilever CEO, recently stated: “The global business community remains committed to delivering ambitious climate action, working in partnership with city mayors, governors, and nearly 200 country governments around the world, to ensure that together we capture the economic, public health and environmental benefits of a cleaner, more efficient and resilient global economy” (B Team, 2017).

The practice of collaborative environmental leadership, which is necessary and critical to address myriad crises facing Earth and her inhabitants, operates in stark contrast to heroic or managerial leadership. It does not view Earth’s resources as organizational inputs to be managed or conquered. It takes its cue from the natural environment, from the way in which ecosystems depend on their members and operate within limits. It embraces the climate crisis as motivation for leaders to leave ego by the wayside and band together as collaborators safeguarding our common future.

Notes

1    “The Millennium Development Goals set time bound targets, by which progress in reducing income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter and exclusion – while promoting gender equality, health, education and environmental sustainability – can be measured. They also embody basic human rights – the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter and security. The Goals are ambitious but feasible and, together with the comprehensive United Nations development agenda, set the course for the world’s efforts to alleviate extreme poverty by 2015” (United Nations, 2008, p. 2).

2    The ten principles are: Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights, and make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses. Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labor, the effective abolition of child labor, and the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges, undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility, and encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies. Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery (The Ten Principles, n.d.).

3    World Leaders come together at a United Nations Summit in 2015 to ratify the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which comprises 17 SDGs. These goals provide a practical framework for a global agenda to end poverty, attack inequality and confront climate change.

4    Companies that fail to report are delisted from C4C membership rolls.

5    Sustainable Energy for All is a United Nations-sponsored, ongoing, global movement to provide universal access to renewable energy. (See www.se4all.org/.)

6    One of the most well-known PES schemes is REDD+, or reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries. (See http://redd.unfccc.int/.)

7    Climate change is often termed a super wicked problem because of four characteristics: It must be addressed before it’s too late, those of us trying to find a solution are responsible for creating the problem, government structures are non-existent or timid, and the economics of discounting push the problem off the current agenda (Levin et al., 2012).

8    The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is a global disclosure framework that enables companies to systematically self-report environmental impacts according to a well-defined protocol. (See www.cdp.net/en/info/about-us.)

9    Uncited quotes within this chapter are from observations of conversations and informal, unattributed interviews with participants at UNGC events.

10    As a postscript, since the initiative was launched, over 100 UN Global Compact companies have made commitments to formally engage in climate policy development action.

11    This could be done either through a global tax on carbon at the input or output to production or through the development of carbon emission trading systems such as those implemented in the EU, Canada, the Northeastern US, and California.

12    UNGC members also gathered in December 2014 in Lima, Peru, at COP 20 for the second Caring for Climate Business Forum, entitled Innovation, Ambition, Collaboration.

13    Companies implement an internal price on carbon within their organizations in a variety of ways. They could develop a shadow price, and use it to evaluate investments; create an internal tax, fee, or trading system; or describe an implicit price based on how much the organization spends to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

14    The carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition is a voluntary partnership between leaders from government, business, and civil society dedicated to building an evidence base to use in communicating the effectiveness of carbon pricing as a means of mitigating global climate change. Coalition members work on policy development, implementation, and evaluation. (See www.carbonpricingleadership.org/leadership-coalition.)

15    INDCs are the individual measures that UNFCCC signatory countries committed to act upon to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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