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.
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Fall 2024
Research Article|
May 15 2024
Are Corporations Responding to Civil Society Pressure?: A Multilevel Analysis of Corporate Emissions
Annika Rieger
Singapore Management University
Annika Rieger is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University. Her current projects utilize quantitative and computational methods to investigate how corporations contribute and respond to climate change.
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Sociology of Development (2024) 10 (3): 310–334.
Citation
Annika Rieger; Are Corporations Responding to Civil Society Pressure?: A Multilevel Analysis of Corporate Emissions. Sociology of Development 1 September 2024; 10 (3): 310–334. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sod.2023.0047
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