The Future of Companies in the Fight against Climate Change: possible risks coming from the recent Environmental Social Movements

Abstract

The paper addresses the issue of climate change by exploring it from the perspective of companies: the lack of an effective global cooperation, induced by the fragility of international negotiations, threatens to leave companies exposed to possible attacks by the recent environmental social movements, such as the Friday's For Future movement, currently led by activist Greta Thunberg. These new forms of environmental activism exploit social networks to amplify the reach of their messages, and are now becoming increasingly widespread and powerful, even in countries with scarse attitude towards environmentalism. In spite of this, they also appear extremely fluid and chaotic, and could get much more radical and unpredictable in the near future, thereby representing a serious threat for companies. Within such scenario, companies may be “voluntarily-forced” by activists to adapt their business model, in order to face these new external pressures: a possible pathway would be to transform themselves into hybrid organizations and finally have their sustainability performance certified by an independent authority: an example could be the “B-Corporations”, certified by the organization “B Lab”. This solution may even represent an opportunity for companies to tackle the issue of climate change while being profitable, as Certified B-Corporations seem to currently represent a virtuous business model, able to combine concepts of sustainable development with those of traditional profitability. The possible interactions between companies, activists and public regulators are approached in the paper starting from the contributions on the theme of Private Politics made by Baron (2001) and then of Egorov & Harstad (2017), through their game theoretic model on activism, in order to investigate the possible implications of environmental activism for companies.