Special issue of leadership: Leadership and climate change: Authority,legitimacy and the ‘crisis of governance’

Climate change and the threat to human well-being it represents is one of Virilio’s (2012) fear-inducing crises, a defining symptom of our times and the greatest challenge facing humanity. The scale of the response required is enormous: the radical decarbonisation of global energy, industrial and transport systems; the mass replacement of oil, coal and gas by renewables such as solar and wind; and the reinvention of established economic, social and political conventions (Hulme and Blackman, 2009). As a contemporary ‘grand challenge’ (George et al., 2016), climate change ‘like almost all environmental issues, is a debate over culture, worldviews, and ideology’ (Hoffman, 2012: 32). This requires a focus on social and environmental concerns beyond profit maximisation, where the demand for action is coming more from social movements, bottom up approaches and community-focused solutions rather than from government and/or business alone, and poses clear ethical concerns and social justice imperatives requiring the re-invention of dominant values.

More often than not couched in the apocalyptic language of abrupt non-linear and potentially calamitous ruptures, the advocates of immediate and far-reaching measures to address climate change emphasise the importance of leadership, as reflected in resource capabilities, legitimacy and credibility (Karlsson et al., 2011), as critical to addressing the crisis of governance facing the Earth’s natural systems. Much of this debate, particularly in the context of political leadership, is predicated on a ‘great man’ perspective on leadership, relying on ‘the exceptional few’ (Scheffer et al., 2003: 493) to catalyse opinion and drive effective change. Given the failures to deliver on climate change policies, others have called for a more ‘grass-roots’ perspective on leadership, grounded in sub-national, often local and community-based, initiatives (Ostrom, 2012). However, it remains the case that such leadership implications of climate change remain under-researched and under-discussed.

A decade ago Goodall (2008) asked why leading management journals were ignoring climate change, and concluded that such an absence reflected the existence of a kind of ‘ghettoization’ that has led to an undesirable lag in social science between articles appearing in peripheral publications and so-called elite journals. Since then, there has been an emerging mainstreaming interest in climate change in organisation and management studies (e.g. special issues of Business and Society, 2012; Organization, 2013; Organization Studies, 2012). However, while the construction and construal of crisis in general has engaged leadership scholars (Leadership, 2015), they have had little to say on climate change specifically.

One reason for this is that in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world characterised by wicked problems defined by their scale, complexity and incomprehensibility, the actions needed require complex and systematic change that crosses traditional institutional boundaries, and requires new leadership capabilities. There is, however, in the leadership and crisis literature an event-focus not a process-orientation. This diverts attention from slowburn gradual crises which are endemic and constitutive and unfold on a grand scale over a significant period of time (e.g. climate change) to low probability unexpected, unpredictable but time-limited events with antecedents and consequences that can be measured (e.g. hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes). There is, in other words, a focus on the epiphenomena not the phenomenon itself. Among the categories of risk related to the changing climate are: government regulation; research, development and innovation; litigious actions against environmental harm; reputational and branding effects; rising supply chain costs; and more frequent environmental disasters. However, while there are numerous articles in management journals that cover these areas, there are very few that focus empirically on climate change itself (Goodall, 2008) and/or cross these diversities of risks bringing their place and time realities under a leadership approach/heading that current social movements suggest. The upshot is that in the climate change debate, leadership is the ‘dog that did not bark’ (O’Reilly et al., 2015: 490), a silence attributed to the introspective, decontextualised, atomistic and ineffectual characteristics of contemporary leadership studies, leaving unchallenged and unaddressed a redefinition of leadership that matches the ‘goals, ambitions and destinies we foresee for ourselves’ (Hulme, 2010: 298).

Climate change, as a wicked problem represents a tragedy of the commons, as economic development based on fossil fuel use has generated benefits in the developed nations at the expense of global environmental destruction (Wright and Nyberg, 2019). For Grint (2010), wicked problems require leadership (whereas tame problems require management and critical problems require a command approach). Various commentators have pointed to the need for new forms of and approaches to leadership, including complex adaptive leadership, relational leadership involving different actors, the development of new leadership capabilities in overcoming the institutional barriers in dealing with climate change and a new sensemaking approach to internal and external stakeholders. However, there is still no clear answer to the ‘what kind of leadership does a response to climate change need and how do we develop it?’ question. Indeed, some have gone so far as to argue that not only has this question not been answered, it has not even been asked, and leadership has been abandoned, the problem having been outsourced to the younger generation to sort out their own paths to the future.

This has been reinforced by the ghettoisation of climate change research referred to by Goodall (2008), and is somewhat ironic given the efforts being made to bridge the theory/practice and rigour/relevance divides, as reflected in, for example, calls for a more engaged scholarship, a focus on evidence-based management, increased concern with the (practitioner) coproduction and impact of our research, and calls for breadth of perspective vs narrow data mining based on the analysis of practice involving reflective practitioners. None of this is new. However, the academy – and this applies with as much force to leadership studies as to any other domain – remains dominated by theory-driven research rather than phenomenon-driven scholarship, the self-referential knowing more and more about less and less, excavating silos not building bridges. In the words of Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist and academic, the academy is increasingly producing theologians not martyrs.

It is against this background that we have developed this Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Leadership. We are interested in receiving agenda-setting papers addressing leadership and climate change from multiple perspectives and disciplines. This includes policy studies, political economy, economics, development studies, sociology, geosciences, engineering, philosophy, literary criticism (fiction, and science fiction in particular, as source material) as well as the usual suspects, e.g. leadership studies, organisation theory and behaviour, technology and innovation management, ethics, sustainability studies, strategy, human resource management and entrepreneurship.

In terms of style of paper, we welcome conceptual papers, reviews, polemics, agenda-setting pieces, critiques, empirical analyses and applications of heroic and post-heroic leadership models to climate change. Papers adopting a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary perspective are particularly welcome.

Among the topics that could be addressed are, for example:

How does the definition of ‘climate change’ and the ways it is construed and constructed across multiple discourses contribute to a particular idea of leadership? For example, how do climate scientists view their leadership role, as opposed to politicians, policy makers, civil servants, financiers, business people, artists, writers and so on?