Organisational struggles over the natural environment: a co-evolutionary analysis

Abstract

Due to its multidimensional nature and impacts, climate change requires a systemic, multilevel response approach incorporating organisational, small-scale, regional and national institutions, as well as global governance mechanisms, which together form the climate change response regime. We argue that, since organizations are embedded in this response regime, they have to both develop their own direct climate change response actions and, at the same time, respond to the tensions and struggles manifested within the response regime. The organisational interactions that occur within the response regime, in relation to the management of struggles over the natural environment are also under-theorised. Therefore, this research paper investigates how organizations manage these struggles through intra and inter organisational interactions within the response regime. More specifically the research questions guiding our study are: how do organisations manage struggles over the natural environment? and, what inter and intra organisational interactions drive these responses? For This paper adopted a co-evolutionary theoretical perspective, which provides us with a framework for understanding change in complex socio-ecological systems (Abatecola, 2012; Breslin, 2014; Child & Rodrigues, 2011) for investigating interactions between organizational and environmental systems. Our findings reveal that organisational and regime climate change responses where interdependent, as a result of symbiotic or mutualistic co-evolution (Jones, Ferrière, & Bronstein, 2009; McKelvey, 2002) This paper makes a number of contributions to the discipline of management and organisation studies, as well as to literature on policy interventions, by identifying inter and intra-organisational co-evolutionary interactions that drive organisational responses to tensions and struggles over the natural environment. More specifically, we identify those interactions whereby an organisation manages the challenges of response regime struggles and, at the same time, develops its own climate change responses. Co-evolutionary interaction is illustrated by the specific ways in which the firm’s responses are influenced by and influence developments within the response regime.