Corporate Biosphere stewardship and new horizons in corporate reporting

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This presentation is premised on two elements: one conceptual the other empirical, both of which stand in contrast to current assumptions about corporate responsibility for sustainability and the way in which accountability for corporate action may be discharged. 

Conventionally, corporate responsibility for social/environmental/sustainability impacts has been determined by a mixture of direct regulation (addressing corporate behaviour) alongside any voluntary responsibilities that a corporation takes on over and above formal legal minimums. The resulting combined standards for action include actions to be taken as well as not taken. While notions of corporate responsibility focused on financial matters, in the last 30- or 40-years corporations have voluntarily made commitments to achieve outcomes beyond minimum standards that they perceived that they had direct control or leverage over realising. 

The rationale for going beyond minimum compliance was predicated on different aspects, including corporate leaders’ ethical aspirations, notions of wider social contract responsibilities as well as activities driven by concern about reputation/focused on fitting within norms of behaviour. Alongside this changing landscape of responsibility, accountability norms have also evolved to include more expansive reporting of matters that relate to these ever-widening responsibilities. During the presentation I will argue that the notion of the Anthropocene disrupts the idea of an expansion of both corporate action and discharge of accountability through reporting of outcomes (Bebbington et al., 2020). Of particular focus is the need to develop what we frame as ‘corporate biosphere stewardship’ because the combined impacts that corporate action creates is systemic in character requiring notions of responsibility (and related accountability through reporting) on the combined impacts of cohorts of corporations focused on particular kinds of impacts and/or impacts in particular locations.

Prior work (Bebbington et al., 2024a, b, c) has been undertaken to characterise the capabilities that would be required for corporate biosphere stewardship to be created, namely:

1. a robust way of connecting corporate activities to the biosphere which includes the conceptual acceptance that corporations are embedded in and not separate from the biosphere as well as the development of traceability systems to identify biosphere interactions;
2. corporate managers possess a values-based orientation to be biosphere stewards that is founded on valuing the biosphere beyond business exchanges along with an extension of responsibilities beyond corporate boundaries (with a sense of how to exercise agency to leverage their power beyond corporate boundaries);
3. the reformation of a various ‘markets for responsibility’ (e.g. capital markets) so they can support corporations who wish to become biosphere stewards; and
4. developing inter-corporate coalitions to achieve stewardship ambitions (see Sobkowiak, forthcoming).

The presentation will explore these elements and make the case for a step change in corporate responsibilities and associated reporting.

References

Bebbington, J., Österblom, H., Crona, B., Jouffray, J., Larrinaga, C., Russell, S., Scholtens, B. (2020). Accounting and accountability in the Anthropocene. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 33(1), 152-177.

Bebbington, J., Blasiak, R., Larrinaga, C., Russell, S., Sobkowiak, M., Jouffray, J-B. and Österblom, H. (2024a). Shaping Nature Outcomes in Corporate Settings. Philosophical Transactions B. 37920220325.

Bebbington, J. and Iszatt-White, M. (2024b). Corporate Biosphere Stewardship. In Leadership as Stewardship: Honouring Our Past While Ensuring Our Future. Izsatt-White, M. (ed). Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham.

Bebbington, J., Larrinaga, C. and Michelon, G. (2024c). A socio-ecological approach to corporate governance, 360-371. In Handbook on Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility, Magnan, M. and Michelon, G. (eds). Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham.

Sobkowiak, M., Bebbington, J., Blasiak, R., Folke, and Österblom, H. (forthcoming). Accountability in collaborative settings: understanding inter-corporate sustainability initiatives. Accounting Forum