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Governance and Change Management for Sustainability summary
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Week 46 lecture 1: IntroThe ingredients for change: Governance
Governance is inherently implicated in any intentional effort to shape ‘change’; and
Sustainability changes are deeply and unavoidably political and need to be recognized as
such.
Private governance
● Cooperative rule-making by firms and/or civil society organizations with little or no
direct involvement from governments, governmental agencies or intergovernmental
organizations.
The firm is central to understanding, analyzing and shaping change towards sustainability
because:
● It is firms that are changing or need to change towards sustainability; and
● They do so in different ways and to different extents; and
● Some are more successful than others.
The ingredients for change
Governance:
● Power to govern for change towards sustainability
● Effectiveness of private governance for sustainability
● Legitimacy of private governance for sustainability
Organization/Firm:
● Drivers for change and resistance to sustainability change in organizations
● Effectiveness of organizational change for sustainability – types, models
● Leadership and strategies for sustainability change
Week 46 lecture 2: The power to govern for sustainability transformations
Conceptualisation of power
Power is the ability of (business) actors to successfully pursue a desired political objective
(Fuchs, 2005).
Three faces of power:
● Instrumental: direct influence on policy outputs
● Structural: influence on the input side of political processes
● Discursive: the ability to frame norms and ideas
Instrumental power
Concept of instrumental power:
● ‘Ability of A to make B do something that they would otherwise not do’.
● Visible contestation over policy outputs
,Key form of influence
● Political lobbying of state representatives at the national or international level
● Either by individual firms (usually TNCs, Transnational corporations) or umbrella
organisations (e.g. International Chamber of Commerce).
Key sources of influence
● Organisational and financial resources
● Established channels of access and influence
● Provision of policy and relevant knowledge and expertise
Structural power
Concept of structural power
● Ability to keep things off the agenda (agenda-setting power)
● Ability to create rules and standards (rule-setting power)
Key forms of influence
● The implicit or explicit threat of relocation of investments
● Problem: largely invisible dimension of power and difficult to research in its
agenda-setting form
Key sources of influence
● Level of market concentration
● Importance to economic growth, employment and innovation
● Dependence of political elites on economic success for political legitimacy and
electoral success
Discursive power
Concept of discursive power
● Ability to shape norms and ideas
● Ability not only to pursue interests but also to create them
Key forms of influence
● Communication strategies to shape public and elite perceptions of environmental
problems and solutions
● Framing of environmental issues that require business involvement and solutions
Key sources of influence
● Ability to buy media time and finance advertisements and information campaigns
● New media giants
Week 47 lecture 3: The effectiveness of private governance for sustainability
Private governance: Cooperative rule-making by firms and/or civil society organizations with
little or no direct involvement from governments, governmental agencies or
intergovernmental organizations
Private governance has been enabled and is sustained by the increasing power of private
actors.
, Forms of private governance institutions/mechanisms
● Corporate social responsibility reporting (weak requirements; first-party auditing)
● Codes of conduct (medium requirements; second-party auditing)
● Private standards (strong requirements; third-party auditing)
Key characteristics of private standards as governance mechanisms
● They represent enduring and prescriptive requirements in the private sector relying
on various sorts of certification, third-party auditing, and sanction mechanisms
● They rely on market forces and public scrutiny to exert pressure on their target group
and generate sustainability benefits
Effectiveness
Output: the standard and its characteristics
Outcome: change in behaviour of actors
Impact: actual improvement in the problem area
Can be analysed at the:
- Aggregate level (e.g. private standards as a field)
- Individual/micro-level (why is standard x more effective than standard y?)
Output: the standard itself
Stringency of the rules/standards: the degree to which the standards require actors to
implement ambitious and well-defined prescriptions for environmental and/or social conduct.
Quality of the audit mechanism: the rigorousness and impartiality of the certification
process.
Outcome
Standard uptake: the extent to which the rules/standards are adopted by the intended
target group:
Membership size and type + geographic coverage + collective share of the resource
that needs to be protected.
Level of compliance: the extent to which the target group actually complies with the
particular standard, which often requires managerial and organisational changes, adoption of
different production methods and technologies etc.
Impact
Measurable environmental, social and economic benefits as a result of the standard in
question. Careful with establishing causality!
Trade-off: the higher the stringency the lower the uptake (in places that most need it). The
higher the uptake the lower the stringency. Both result in a low impact.
Two main approaches to increase effectiveness:
Direct approach: direct changes in behaviour
Indirect approach: interaction with other initiatives
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