Introduction to the Special Issue on “Social Movements and Private Environmental Governance”

Historically, environmental progress has come primarily from government regulation. The major environmental laws of the 1970s, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act in the United States, marked a fundamental change in the relationship between industry and the natural environment. Moreover, research suggests that these laws, while imperfect, have provided billions of dollars of benefits to citizens in the form of longer lives, improved health, and more attractive communities (Anthoff & Hahn, 2010). More recently, however, environmental problems have become increasingly complex and global in scope, with effects that play out slowly over decades and are fraught with scientific uncertainties. This has made solving them via traditional regulatory approaches increasingly difficult. At the same time, corporate lobbying influence has grown enormously (Drutman, 2015), with new forms of media opening the door to sophisticated corporate nonmarket strategies, and the presence of “dark money” making it harder to track the sources of political influence. All of these factors render coordinated government solutions to environmental challenges difficult.

In response, social movements have mobilized to demand solutions to unresolved problems. Governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have increasingly shifted away from the use of traditional public law and toward private environmental governance (PEG), with a reliance on voluntary programs, information disclosure, ecolabeling, and activist campaigns against corporate offenders. These phenomena have not gone unnoticed in academia, and numerous groups of scholars have formed to bring attention to them, including the Organizations and the Natural Environment group within the Academy of Management, the Group of Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment and the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. Although much progress has been made in the research community regarding the impact of PEG, much remains poorly understood. Moreover, the relevant research is scattered across economics, political science, management, operations research, sociology and law, making it extremely difficult for researchers to stay abreast of new developments.

The articles in this focused issue emerged from a workshop that I organized in May 2017, with financial and logistical support from the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. Its purpose was to help build an international, interdisciplinary research community interested in social movements, NGO activism, private governance, and information disclosure. The workshop provided a forum for sharing results on current topics such as ecolabel competition, greenwash, the NGO industry, and the links between public and private governance. It also sought to spark new research at the boundaries between disciplines, some of which is presented here.

The workshop was kicked off by a pair of presentations from two leaders in the study of social movements and the NGO industry, Anthony Heyes and Brayden King. I had asked each of them to survey the relevant work in their fields (economics and sociology, respectively), and the research agenda ahead, a task each performed admirably. Sociologists and economists sometimes have difficulty communicating due to differences in terminology, constructs, methods, and levels of analysis. In this case, however, there was a remarkable and unexpected consistency between the two presentations. The coherence of the two talks was so striking that I asked the two presenters to coauthor an article bringing together their insights, which they graciously did. The result, “Understanding the Organization of Green Activism: Sociological and Economic Perspectives,” (Heyes & King, 2020) provides a unique overview of current academic understanding and a road map for future interdisciplinary research in this field.

Students of green activism often characterize NGO strategies toward business as having two main forms: confrontation and cooperation (Lyon, 2012). However, Graeme Auld (2020) argues there is a third form that has been underappreciated: “prefiguration,” that is, leading by example. Organic farming offers an illustrative case. It originated with market participants who had serious concerns about the system of industrial agriculture that had come to dominate farming in many developed countries. This small group began to farm without chemical pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides, consuming some of their own produce and selling some of it locally through farmers’ markets. Today the organic movement is the fastest growing part of the grocery business, and organic food is certified by government agencies in both the European Union and the United States. Auld’s article, “Transforming Markets? Activists’ Strategic Orientations and Engagement with Private Governance,” presents a framework for understanding why different activists adopt different strategies for different situations and takes steps toward an integrated theory of how these approaches interact and evolve over time.

Another underappreciated actor in the PEG space is the university, which is the focus of Sarah Light’s (2020) article “The Role of Universities in Private Environmental Governance Experimentalism.” Light begins by laying out the parallels between public and private governance, and the traditional role of states as “laboratories of experimentation” for public policy. She goes on to suggest that PEG can serve a similar experimental role, performing the prefiguration function described by Auld. Furthermore, because the profit motivation of private firms is rather different from the motives of public policy, universities may actually provide a more directly transferable source of experimental results. She uses the case of Yale University’s internal carbon pricing experiment as an example.

Among the most prominent forms of PEG are information disclosure schemes and voluntary sustainability certification. Both approaches aim to provide consumers with reliable information about the environmental impacts of particular products or companies. Two participants in the workshop have new books that take deep dives into the performance of information-based schemes (Bullock, 2017) and the credibility of transnational labeling programs (van der Ven, 2019). For this special issue, I asked these two authors to collaborate to shed light on a puzzle that afflicts both disclosure and certification schemes: the role of the consumer in making these schemes effective. Although both approaches have seen marked growth in recent years, there are mixed signals over the extent to which consumers actually understand and make use of the information they provide. The authors’ article, “The Shadow of the Consumer: Analyzing the Importance of Consumers to the Uptake and Sophistication of Ratings, Certifications, and Ecolabels,” (Bullock & van der Ven, 2020) argues that existing analyses focus too narrowly on individual consumer purchasing decisions to the exclusion of other mechanisms through which consumers, both as individuals and as an imagined collective, exert influence. They offer a novel framework for understanding the various ways in which the shadow of the consumer underpins the emergence and growth of information-based PEG.

One of the oldest and most developed areas of PEG is sustainable forest management. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit discussed this issue extensively but failed to produce an intergovernmental agreement. Disappointed by this failure, a multistakeholder group led by Greenpeace created the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which instituted a system of private standards and certification. Not long after, the American Forest & Paper Association, an industry trade group, introduced its own alternative, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). Rivalry between the two standards has sometimes been heated, with FSC supporters going so far as to accuse the SFI of being a form of greenwash (Fischer & Lyon, 2014). Perhaps no scholar has studied these two programs more deeply than Benjamin Cashore, who coined the term “nonstate market-driven” to describe these new PEG mechanisms. For this focused issue, Ben and his coauthors Devin Judge-Lord and Constance McDermott team up to assess how FSC and SFI have evolved over time. In the process, they highlight the fact that each scheme contains numerous detailed standards, some more prescriptive than others, which makes it very difficult to conduct a simple, straightforward comparison between them. Indeed, this is a profound problem that plagues many other ecolabels as well. Their article, “Do Private Regulations ‘Ratchet Up?’ A Comparative Classification Framework,” (Judge-Lord, McDermott, & Cashore, 2020) offers a framework for characterizing both the scope and the prescriptiveness of standards and applies it to the rivalry between FSC and SFI. The patterns that the authors document are characterized by “upward divergence,” whereby both programs have ratcheted their standards upward, but at differing rates. The article offers a series of explanations for the observed behavior and provides valuable foundations for future work that seeks to take a more nuanced and empirically grounded approach to studying voluntary standards.

Together, these articles offer fresh insight into how social movements create new forms of PEG. They identify the roles played by key stakeholder groups and the tactics these groups use. They highlight new tactics such as prefiguration, and actors such as universities, that have received little attention to date. They demonstrate the importance of consumers but suggest that the channels through which consumers have impact have not been fully understood. And they illuminate the empirical challenges involved in working on these important topics, as well as their inherently dynamic nature.

Although much has been learned about PEG, much remains to be understood. How do private environmental governance and public politics interact? Are they complements or substitutes? How does ecolabel competition work when each label comprises multiple standards that are difficult to compare? Are there limits to what can be achieved without government intervention? When can nonstate pressures drive transformative change? How is information disclosure processed by humans with inherent cognitive limitations? How do companies develop integrated strategies that reflect both market and nonmarket pressures?

Answering these questions is likely to require a new generation of interdisciplinary research. Valuable contributions have already come from economics, political science, sociology, psychology, management, strategy, law, and operations. But often the most interesting or challenging questions exist at the interstices of disciplines, requiring interdisciplinary collaboration. From this perspective, Heyes and King (2020) offer encouragement that such work is both possible and productive. Organizations like the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS), the Group of Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment (GRONEN), and Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) offer constructive forums to facilitate such progress. And interdisciplinary journals like Organization & Environment offer high-quality outlets that reach scholars in many different disciplines. I hope this focused issue will contribute to seeding this new generation of research.