Description
Investigating how actors involved in corporate environmental initiatives seek to govern stakeholders, this research focuses on specific voluntary private governance initiatives, which I term ‘corporate environmental pacts’. Pacts are initiatives that encourage business members to ‘take action’, certify those actions, market those actions and build virtual communities. Addressing a clear research gap around such initiatives, I investigate the strategies and communications employed by two corporate environmental pacts – 1% for the Planet and The Climate Pledge, and their members.
To better understand the governance relationships at play in corporate environmental pacts, interviews with 14 participants who work for pacts or member organisations, as well as data from pact websites and social media, were subjected to a comparative discourse analysis. The research uses governmentality theory to explore how discourses and logics of socio-environmental change figure in efforts to alter stakeholder behaviour.
I argue that pacts and member companies have comparable ‘theories of change’. These logics represent courses of action made visible and deemed possible. Pacts couch their agency as ‘corporate collective action’ – collaboration and knowledge-sharing between businesses. Their communicative practices are framed as ‘storytelling’, a marketing technique encapsulating tensions present in brand ‘authenticity’, anticipating the greenwashing critiques that often accompany sustainable consumption practices.
