Corporate-Led Environmental Governance: A Theoretical Model

The growing reliance on non-state environmental governance (EG) coupled with the current U.S. political environment portends an increasing salience of governing efforts from non-state actors. Among non-state actors, corporations play a substantial role given their market and societal power, their corresponding social responsibilities, and their organizational and institutional adaptability in developing and performing EG solutions. This article proposes a corporate-led environmental governance (CLEG) model. An important distinction between previous iterations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance and the CLEG model proposed here is the active assertion of corporate environmental leadership as state leadership is subject to retrenchment in the United States.