Companies in Swedish Climate Change Initiatives: The Relationship Between Firm-Level Factors and Participation

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) generated an outcome that emphasized the necessity and urgency of non-state actor participation in climate change governance. Although commitments have increased over time and national governments continue to highlight the importance of non-state action, the current contributions remain insufficient. This failure is partly due to the lack of efforts made by companies – a category of non-state actors that have serious impact on the scope of the problem. This article aims to explain companies’ climate action by assessing the relation between companies´ firm—level characteristics and their participation in two transnational climate initiatives in Sweden. The firm-level characteristics include company size, adoption of Environment Social and Governance (ESG) principles and their disclosure of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions amongst others. The binary logistic regression applied to our dataset that comprises 254 companies indicates that ESG principles with a specification about climate and disclosure of CO2 emissions is positively correlated with initiative membership. We discuss the implications of our findings for global climate change governance and the role of the private sector in taking climate action.