Aspirational Politics in Private Transnational Governance: Corporate Commitments to International Climate Change Goals

Why do transnational corporations commit to lofty international goals that are negotiated and set by governments? Martha Finnemore and Michelle Jurkovich (2020) advanced a framework on the politics of aspiration in which they identify ‘international aspirational goals’ as lofty goals that require significant effort over time and transformation through imaginative thinking. Many such goals are decided on through inter-state negotiations, but corporations frequently make public commitments to achieving them. This phenomenon is evident in proclamations of corporate commitments to the UN Sustainable Development Goals or a 1.5°C limit on global warming. In Finnemore and Jurkovich’s conceptualization, aspiration serves to galvanize support from diverse stakeholders without identifying concrete behavioral standards for specified actors – unlike international norms, which require both features. Scholars, however, have not yet explained why corporate executives would commit to aspirations that are set intergovernmentally. Moreover, it is not obvious that Finnemore and Jurkovich’s conjectures on aspiration apply as readily to corporate actors as they do to states, although the framework is intended to apply to state and non-state actors alike. For example, while governments may (in many cases) face few social costs and receive praise for failing to live up to an aspirational goal when partial progress is made, corporate executives may not so easily find reprieve. Governments could remain in power where the opposition is seen as even less likely to have achieved the goal, or where other issues have more political salience than the aspirational goal on which the government has come up short. Governments can also retain power through less salubrious means, such as civil repression. Corporations, however, have fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders and require a social license from the public to operate. In particularly competitive industries, consumers can 'vote with their wallets' and purchase goods and services from competitors who did not fail to live up to commitments, or who do more than their fair share of collective efforts towards goal attainment. Corporations could make insincere commitments to reap reputational rewards – often known as greenwashing, or ‘goalswashing’ – but this may be harder to achieve where aspirations are matched with deadlines and clearly defined metrics for measuring progress. This paper seeks to explain why transnational corporations commit to international aspirational goals set by governments. It considers the case of international climate change goals – here, the linked aspirations of global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and limiting warming to 1.5°C as set by states in the Paris Agreement on climate change. I conduct a major new survey of transnational corporations and present descriptive statistics from responses. I supplement these findings with interviews and content analysis of corporate social responsibility reporting to elucidate corporate motivations for committing to these climate goals. The results allow me to test conjectures on corporate commitment motivations from different schools of international relations theory and from the business studies literature. The paper thus offers an important contribution to developing and refining nascent theorizing on aspiration.