Varieties of Capitalism and US versus Chinese Corporations’ Climate Change Strategies

Abstract

While climate change is global in its impact, its historical origins are in the world’s major industrialized states, and they together with those that are industrializing are now its major contributors. This is why authors like Giddens (2011) have noted that casting the problem of climate change as fundamentally ‘global’ in nature abstracts from the geopolitical realities. The US and China in particular stand out for their contribution to the problem. They are both the world’s largest economies and the two top greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting states, accounting for 40 percent of total GHG emissions in 2009 (World Bank, 2013a). Relatedly, there have been studies of the strategic responses by corporations to environmental issues. Of course, environmentalists and social groups often argue that profit-maximization oriented multinational corporations (MNCs) care little about the environmental consequences of their activities. But even if challenges in implementing environmental strategies persist, their environmental behavior has been presented more positively from strategic international business (Rugman and Verbeke, 1998a, b; Kolk and Pinkse, 2008) and integrative management-stakeholder relationship perspectives (Bansal and Roth, 2000). These studies, and others building on them, have enriched our understanding of the environmental responsiveness of corporations and highlighted the pressures on firms caused by market dynamics, environmental regulation, and societal expectations (for example, Bansal and Roth, 2000; Delmas and Toffel, 2008; Murillo-Luna et al., 2008; Darnall et al., 2010).