Conference Agenda

International organisations (IOs) play an important, albeit still widely underappreciated, role in enabling or deflecting sustainability transformations in global and national governance. Although many scholars would agree that IOs are highly influential in setting parameters for processes of change, IOs’ discourses on institutional and societal changes towards sustainability have received surprisingly scant attention in existing scholarship. As a result, we lack comparative longitudinal knowledge about what causes of unsustainability different IOs have identified and what pathways of change they have sketched in response. This paper addresses this problematic oversight by contributing comparative knowledge about the sustainability discourses of leading contemporary IOs to current debates about the challenges of global sustainability governance. In order to achieve both breadth and depth in scrutinising a large sample of relevant IO documents, we combine quantitative methods of text and discourse analysis with qualitative methods. Specifically, we examine the discourses of IOs working in the fields of economy and development (IMF, OECD, UNDP and World Bank), energy (IEA and IRENA), and food and agriculture (FAO). For each IO, we collect a sample of regular reports published over the last 10 years (2002–22). We use these materials to reveal how the IOs conceptualise and talk about sustainability, how their views of sustainability have changed over time, and how conceptions of sustainability and required social changes potentially converge or diverge between them. In our analysis, we pay particular attention to type, depth and pace of the changes envisaged in these reports. Based on our empirical findings, we discuss similarities and differences in IOs’ framings of sustainability, thereby generating much-needed comparative quantitative and qualitative insights into how contemporary IOs speak about this cross-cutting and most urgent transnational issue.

Corporate actors play a crucial role in efforts to mitigate climate change. A plethora of research has already scrutinized different private-sector initiatives. Yet, we still know very little about the normative priorities of private actors, especially the particularly important multinational companies. We thus ask: How do corporate actors engage with international norms regarding climate change and what kind of normative priorities do they follow? Supply chains, production processes, logistics and packaging, and the broader corporate strategy can all have massive effects on emissions. In this paper, we examine annual disclosure reports submitted to the Carbon Disclosure Project since 2010 using quantitative text analysis. Multinational firms use these reports to tell investors and customers about their understanding of climate change and their agenda for action. The documents thus enable us to track how discourse on climate change and the associated normative priorities have evolved over time and between different types of firms. Relating these findings to the broader discourse, we scrutinize the prevalence of green growth and low carbon technology narratives among multinational firms. This provides important implications for climate governance and international political economy scholarship on private actors in the fight against climate change. This research, therefore, contributes to the conference theme of architecture and agency by “address[ing] institutional frameworks and actors implicated in earth system governance and how they resist or respond to change and evolve over time.”

Global norms in corporate disclosures:

Multinational firms’ discourse on climate change

Private auditors often perform verification functions for private sustainability standards schemes. The standards setters engage private auditors for different reasons. They can be a means to meet expectations that the standard setter is arm’s length to the process of verifying compliance against its rules. They can be engaged because they bring expertise to the verification process. And they can be, when operating in a market for audit services, a mechanism to provide choice to potential regulatory targets that want to comply with the standard setter’s rules. Despite these understood roles private auditors play, there is a striking absence of empirical documenting and comparing the way this verification function is carried out across private sustainability standards schemes. We seek to fill this gap with a never-before developed dataset of all auditors accredited to work for 76 private schemes. This data permits a careful examination of differences across schemes and an identification of the power and prominence of certain private auditors. We complement this data with an analysis of five case study schemes that work on the voluntary verification and validation of greenhouse gas offsets. We reflect on implications for private sustainability governance with respect to how audit markets do or do not perform as expected, and what governance interventions might be needed to remedy these shortcomings.

The global shift needed to adapt to climate change will come in many forms. Long established food production systems are set to struggle while coastal cities face inundation by the sea. Other areas will be impacted by heatwaves beyond current local tolerance. There is a general acknowledgement that millions of people will eventually need to relocate due to the deterioration of the conditions which support life and livelihoods. Migration and displacement are becoming more prevalent in national and international dialogues about climate change; however, human displacement will not occur in isolation.

Climate migration, broadly conceived, is a migration of earth’s systems- both human and ecological. This paper reevaluates traditional anthropocentric climate migration and displacement through the Earth System Governance (ESG) research lens. Flora and fauna similarly depend on a relative stasis in their habitable zones and without such, will also migrate. Political borders and current governance structures pose a challenge to the migration, dislocation, displacement, and eventual relocation of people, animals, societies, and ecosystems alike. This paper will examine climate migration through the five analytical problems of ESG’s research framework and their crosscutting themes. Using ESG frameworks to reassess climate migration through varied scales, systems, and subjects demonstrates the full breadth of global relocation(s) necessary to adapt to the complexities of the Anthropocene.