Business Strategy and International Environmental Governance: Toward a Neo-Gramscian Synthesis

The centrality of business in negotiating, structuring, and implementing regimes of international environmental governance is all too obvious to negotiation participants. Dupont’s inuence over the US administration’s position on ozone-depleting gasses and the fossil fuel industry’s leverage over negotiations to limit greenhouse gas emissions have been well documented.1 The trend toward privatization of governance, in the areas of environmental management systems, chemicals in foodstuffs, and related trade disputes, have also received some critical attention.2 Nevertheless, theoretical tools for understanding the relationship of business to international environmental governance are underdeveloped. Despite considerable popular concern with the growing power of multinational corporations (MNCs) and the lack of democratic accountability in international governance, there has been little scholarly attention to the mechanisms and effectiveness of corporate political strategies directed toward international environmental regimes, nor to the underlying processes by which corporate perceptions of their interests develop. A focus on the role of the private sector suggests the need for a political economy approach. The interdisciplinary framework developed here bridges macro and micro-levels of analysis by bringing together perspectives from International Relations (IR) with theories of management and organization. In broad terms, we view the uneven and fragmented nature of international governance as the outcome of a process of bargaining, compromise, and alliance formation at the level of speciŽc regimes. These negotiations, which are constitutive of the broader structures of global governance, engage a range of actors including states and transnational organizations, businesses and industry associations, and social forces such as environmental and labor groups. Organizations such as the UN and the World Trade Organization serve in multiple capacities; as fora for bargaining, as targets of policy, and as semi-autonomous agents in their own right.