About a year ago, I traced the evolution of expectations about what responsible lobbying should look like. Back then I argued that the climate emergency is driving a substantive re-evaluation of what it means for companies to engage with the political sector in a responsible manner. The most recent COP27 summit provides yet more intriguing evidence of how the climate emergency is driving a deep transformation of what responsible lobbying means. Here are two examples:
Dieter Zinnbauer
Dieter Zinnbauer is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. He works on issues of corporate political strategy.
Corporate democratic responsibility – messy and difficult, yet urgent and without alternative
We live in politically tumultuous times. Authoritarianism is on the rise again across the world. Democratic freedoms have been in decline for 15 years in a row. The share of people living in free societies has shrunk to a meagre 14% of the world population. Meanwhile polarisation and populism, disinformation, mistrust and rising inequality have begun […]
Better than nothing but still “exSASBerating”!
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager promises to leverage its weight and voting power for more consistent and comprehensive corporate reporting on sustainability. And this includes corporate lobbying.
The Uberization of corporate political action
With more than USD 12 billion spent the 2020 US election cycle may well have been the most expensive political campaign in the world so far. Yet in the shadows of this epic political contest another campaign unfolded that in my view provides some really interesting early signals on emerging trends in corporate political activity. Alongside the […]
Lobbying and the virus – three trends to take note of
Writing about anything in relation to Covid-19 is rather hopeless. Any attempt to describe current developments has a half-time of 30 minutes. Any attempt to speculate what lies ahead drowns in the flood of near infinite plausible trajectories. And any and every attempt usually ends up with the hammer and nail problem, resulting in the […]
Just Announced: And the World’s Worst Company is …. Really?
Why naming a hardly known German company as the world’s most controversial company inadvertently makes a lot of sense.
Business + Purpose = Big Trouble. But Wait, Here is One Surprising Point of Agreement
Reactions to the recent statement by the Business Roundtable that recognizes a regard for stakeholders rather than a narrow focus on shareholders as a pillar of corporate purpose have been swift, strong and predictably diverse.
Big fuss about a big policy plan – and why this matters for corporate social responsibility: the Chinese social credit system
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