An important challenge for climate policy is to encourage the transfer of climate-friendly technologies to countries at the periphery, where firms often still use less innovative and more outdated technology. Licensing out foreign technology to these firms could represent a promising channel, but it remains unclear what periphery country firms do with the technologies they obtain through licensing agreements, and under what conditions they actually take measures to reduce their environmental impact. I aim to address these unknowns by developing an ability-motivation-opportunity framework of periphery country firms’ adoption of environmental measures following the transfer of licensed foreign technology, for which I draw on insights from literature on resource recombination, instrumental stakeholder theory, and the attention-based view. Testing my framework on a sample of 2,237 firms from 30 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, I find support for my framework. My study thereby sheds new light on the conditions under which the international transfer of technology to small- and medium-sized firms at the economic periphery leads these firms to more extensively adopt measures to reduce their environmental impact, and offers a more nuanced perspective of international business’ impact on the climate and sustainable development more broadly.

Green ventures should play an important role in the needed transition towards more environmentally sustainable economies. Theoretical arguments on the relative sustainability of new ventures are often conflicting, however, and empirical evidence is limited. We address this debate by analyzing the adoption of environmentally sustainable practices by new ventures, including the potential moderating effects of the use of digital technologies (DTs) and participation in global value chains (GVCs). Using EU-wide data, we find that new ventures are on average less likely than mature organizations to adopt sustainable business practices. This suggests that a ‘sustainability learning curve’ exists and that organizations need time to develop environmentally efficient products and operations. We also find that Blockchain technology and GVCs positively moderate the ‘new venture-sustainability’ relation, shortening the learning curve and enabling sustainability upgrading in new enterprises. A key finding of this study is that a small but relevant sub-group of new ventures—born with digitalization and a global outlook imprinted in their DNA—are leading the way to environmentally sustainable business operations.

In this study, we examine how increasing climate risk in potential host locations impacts MNEs’ location choice for foreign direct investments (FDIs) and consider how the network contingencies, the connectedness of MNEs in the industrywide collocation network, and the connectedness of MNEs' country of origin (COO) in the global outward FDI network, moderate this relationship. using a novel dataset from the global automobile industry between 2003 and 2019 we argue and demonstrate that the negative externalities of climate risk reduce the likelihood of MNEs locating their FDI in high-climate-risk locations. Further, we find that increasing COO connectedness increases the MNEs’ informational advantages and amplifies the negative impact of increasing climate risk in host locations on MNEs' FDI location choices. Thus, MNEs from more connected COOs are less likely to locate their FDI in high-climate-risk locations. However, the increasing MNE connectedness increases isomorphic pressures and imitative tendencies among collocated MNEs. This attenuates the negative impact of increasing climate risk in host locations on MNEs' FDI location choices. Thus, MNEs more embedded in FDI collocation networks are more likely to locate their FDI in high-risk locations.