Description
This paper examines how the recent rise of populism shapes multinational corporations’ environmental strategies and commitments. It starts from a straightforward observation: many MNCs have diluted or deferred sustainability targets in the past few years. This is more than firm-level cost cutting. As ideological currents have moved from a centrist consensus toward a populist right, the perceived costs of environmental initiatives have grown relative to expected gains. Those costs are relational and transnational—produced in the interplay of capital, ideology, state power, and production models that span borders. Elections, trade disputes, and energy-security debates steadily recalibrate the corporate calculus.
Using a critical, historical lens, the article also revisits earlier “greenwashing” cycles in which environmental programmes were presented as win–win. It reconstructs the targets MNCs set, the narratives used to justify them, and the investors and regulators who endorsed those narratives. Placed alongside today’s retrenchment, these episodes show how corporate benchmarks are repeatedly rewritten as political–economic tides turn and as rule-making shifts across global arenas.
The core claim is simple: power relations and changing forms of common sense set the boundaries of corporate environmental action—and those boundaries are conjunctural. This helps explain why rollbacks in sustainability commitments cluster with broader ideological realignments, and why what counts as “feasible” or “cost-effective” remains unstable in the international political economy. In short, debates over corporate climate action are also contests over who bears the costs of transition and which futures are made politically imaginable.
