Are corporations responding to civil society pressure?: A multilevel analysis of corporate emissions

Previous research in the world-society tradition associates improvements in nation-level environmental outcomes with greater civil society integration. However, research in the world-systems tradition indicates these improvements depend on a nation’s position in the global political-economic hierarc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: RIEGER, Annika Marie
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3948
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5206/viewcontent/Rieger_SocDev_2024.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
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Summary:Previous research in the world-society tradition associates improvements in nation-level environmental outcomes with greater civil society integration. However, research in the world-systems tradition indicates these improvements depend on a nation’s position in the global political-economic hierarchy. To test whether these patterns are present at the organizational level, I estimate a multilevel model using corporate emissions data from the Carbon Disclosure Project and include interactions between world-system position and three measures of civil society integration: number of NGOs, proportion of corporations with climate-management incentives, and number of corporate UN Global Compact signatories. I find that the relationship between civil society pressure and corporate emissions varies with a nation’s position in the world-system. The NGO measure is associated with greater emissions in non-core nations, possibly due to means–ends decoupling or corporate greenwashing. The climate-incentives measure is associated with less corporate-level emissions in the core and more emissions in non-core nations, possibly due to successful regulation in the core leading to ecologically unequal exchange. I argue that reducing corporate emissions requires accounting for increasingly complicated macro-sociological contexts, as corporations are pressured by and incorporated into world society and participate in patterns of unequal exchange in the world-system.