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Socially responsible investment (SRI) engagement currently performs a variety of supportive regulatory functions such as reframing norms, establishing dialogue and providing resources to improve performance, however corporate responses are voluntary. This chapter will examine the potential gains in effectiveness for SRI engagement in a responsive regulatory regime.

Global warming is a pressing environmental, social and governance (ESG) issue. By using the example of climate change the effectiveness of SRI engagement actors and the regulatory context can be considered. This chapter builds the conceptual framework for responsive regulation of climate change.

SRI engagement may face resistance from corporations due to its voluntary nature and conflict with other goals. Legitimacy and accountability limit the effectiveness of SRI engagement functioning as a voluntary regulatory mechanism. This chapter argues that the effectiveness of SRI engagement on climate change could be enhanced if it served as part of a responsive regulation regime.

Engagement is used by SRIs for ESG issues. A comprehensive regulatory regime could enhance corporate adaptation to climate change through increasing compliance with SRI engagement. The implication for SRI practitioners is that lobbying for a supportive regulatory regime has a large potential benefit.

Responsive regulatory policy involves both support and sanctions to improve compliance, enhancing policy efficiency and effectiveness. There are potentially large net social benefits from utilising SRI engagement in a regulatory regime.

In seeking to re-articulate voluntary and legal approaches this research addresses a gap in the literature on climate change regulation.

This study aims to analyse the relationship between countries’ regulatory context and voluntary carbon disclosures. To date, little attention has been paid to how specific climate change-related regulation influences companies’ climate change disclosures, especially voluntary carbon reporting.

The New Institutional Sociology perspective has been adopted to examine the pressure of a country’s climate change regulation on voluntary carbon reporting. This research uses Tobit regression to analyse data from 2,183 companies in 12 countries that were invited to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire in 2015.

The results show that countries’ specific climate change-related regulation does influence both the participation of its companies in the CDP and their quality, as measured by the CDP disclosure score.

The sample is restricted to 12 countries’ regulatory environment. Thus, caution should be exercised when generalising the results to other institutional contexts.

The results are of use to regulators and policymakers to better understand how specific climate change-related regulation influences voluntary carbon disclosure. Investors may also benefit from this research, as it shows which institutional contexts present greater regulatory stringency and how companies in more stringent environments take advantage of synergy to disclose high-quality carbon information.

By linking regulatory and voluntary reporting, this study sheds light on how companies use voluntary carbon reporting to adapt to social expectations generated in their institutional context.

This is the first research that considers specific climate change-related regulation in the study of voluntary carbon disclosures.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overarching conceptual decision model that delineates the major issues and decisions associated with carbon regulations that will allow executives to better understand the potential regulatory schemes and implications that may be imposed in the near future.

The authors use the extant literature as the foundation to develop a conceptual model of the decisions pertaining to climate change regulation that face business executives today.

This paper suggests four major categories of issues that must be addressed in any climate change regulatory scheme. These include: “scope” – will carbon emission management systems be global or regional; “who pays” – will the consumer or will the supply chain be responsible for the cost of their emissions; “market or compliance‐based mechanisms” – will the CO₂ emissions system be market‐based or a compliance‐based regulatory system; and “criteria” – how can credence of the remedy be established – what is necessary for a business initiative to qualify for as a creditable carbon offset?

This paper offers a framework that categories the fundamental decisions that must be made in any climate change regulation. This framework may be useful in advancing research into any of the four categories of decisions and their implications on commerce and the environment. This paper is designed to be managerially useful and in that way does limit its ability to specifically advance many dimensions of research.

The paper offers executives for a simple model of the decisions that must be made to craft an effective climate change regulatory scheme. In addition, it suggests how these decisions may create exploitable economic opportunities for innovative and proactive firms.

This paper adds value to the debate by clarifying the decisions that must be addressed in any climate change regulation scheme.

This study examines green investment reforms carried out in Bangladesh. The reform process curated significant changes by promoting green investment and fostering the adoption of risk management (RM) rationalities. This study’s focus is on revealing changes in behaviour and explaining how RM can act as an effective generator of climate change mitigation practices.

Building on Foucault's concept of governmentality, the authors apply a “green governmentality” interpretive lens to analyse interviews and documentary evidence, adopting a qualitative case study approach. The authors explore how green governmentality generates RM rationalities and techniques to induce policies and practices within banks and financial institutions (FIs) for climate change mitigation purposes.

The findings provide valuable insights into the reform process and influence of RM rationalities in the context of environmental concerns. The authors find that the reforms and creation of RM rationalities affect the management of climate mitigation practices within banks and FIs and identify the processes through which the RM techniques are transformed as climate concerns are emphasised. The authors illustrate green governmentality as persuasive strategies, which have generated specific ways of seeing climate change reality and new ways of inserting RM into organisational activities, through the green governmentality effects they created. These reforms made climate change actionable and governable through the production of RM rationalities, supported by accounting conceptualisations and processes.

The insights from this study can assist with how we act upon questions of climate change from an RM perspective. Governments, policymakers and regulators who develop climate change-related laws, regulations and policies can draw on these insights to help foster green governmentality for climate change mitigation actions informed by RM practices.

This study offers insights into how climate change is not simply a biophysical reality but a site of power-knowledge dynamics where RM rationalities are constructed, and accounting processes are transformed. The authors show the application of RM and accounting efforts to change investment practices and how changes were encouraged and promoted by using regulation as a persuasive force on knowledgeable subjects rather than a repressive or oppressive power. The analytic power of green governmentality can be applied to increase understanding of how RM rationality contribute to the creation of useful conceptualisations of climate change and provide insights into how organisations respond to green governmentality.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a descriptive analysis of the carbon management activities of the cement industry in Europe, based on a study involving the four largest producers of cement in the world. Based on this analysis, the paper explores the relationship between managerial perception and strategy, with particular focus on the impact of government regulation and competitive dynamics.

The research is based on extensive documentary analysis and in‐depth interviews with senior managers from the four companies who have been responsible for and/or involved in the development of climate change strategies.

It was found that whilst the cement industry has embraced climate change and the need for action, there remains much scope for action in their carbon management activities, with current effort concentrating on hedging practices and win‐win efficiency programs. Managers perceive that inadequate and unfavourable regulatory structure is the key barrier against more action to achieve emission reduction within the industry. Interestingly, EU cement companies are also shifting their CO₂ emissions to less developed countries of the South.

The paper analyses corporate climate strategy in one of the most carbon intensive and yet least studied industries. With specific focus on the EU, the paper highlights a number of policy approaches for encouraging the cement industry on the path of deeper emission reduction.

Legislation plays an essential role in addressing climate change in China. However, many barriers to formulating national legislation to address climate change have so far prevented its enactment. The bottom-up approach adopted in the international climate regime sets a good example. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the regional legislation to address climate change in China through exploring the following two questions: whether it is necessary to enact climate change legislation at regional level first and whether it is feasible to develop such regional legislation in the absence of national climate change law.

This paper analyses the necessity and feasibility of regional legislation to address climate change. Section 2 introduces the current legislative framework on climate change in China. Section 3 investigates whether it is better to push the legislative agenda at regional, rather than national level. Section 4 analyses the feasibility of establishing regional legislative systems. Section 5 explores the key issues in formulating and promoting regional legislation.

This paper concludes that it is necessary and feasible to pilot regional legislation before enacting national legislation. Under these circumstances, local governments can take the initiative to begin formulating regional legislation.

Addressing climate change needs immediate action and effective measures. It is, thus, necessary to reconsider the approach that China should adopt when developing legislation on climate change. This paper contributes to broadening current knowledge of regional climate change legislation in China.

Purpose – This chapter reviews the influence that institutional investors have on corporate climate change disclosures and related reporting regimes.

Approach – We overview recent research undertaken by the authors that provides evidence of the influence of institutional investors on voluntary reporting of climate change information in annual and sustainability reports. In addition, this chapter considers the influence of institutional investors on climate change disclosure regulation and the use of climate change information by investors.

Findings – The material presented in this chapter indicates that institutional investor coalitions have been internationally influential in determining the extent and content of climate change disclosures of large corporations. The CDP annual questionnaire has been particularly influential. The influence of other initiatives such as development of the CDSB reporting framework is not yet clear. Further, the ability of institutional investor coalitions to influence the regulation of climate change disclosure is uncertain, since most national governments have not yet headed requests for greater regulation.

Research implications – Several avenues for future research are identified including a consideration of the trade-offs between investor information demands, costs of compliance and a desire for concise reporting; investor decision making processes as well as the impediments to use of the information currently available; and the validity of the perception that increased disclosure requirements assists with driving emissions reductions and ensuring adequate consideration of climate change risks.

Value – The material presented in this chapter is expected to be useful for informing the continuing debate around the regulation of and/or provision of guidance to companies about the disclosure of climate change related information to investors and other stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the legal complications prevail towards the architecture of mutual policy design between trade and climate change regimes. The recent literature on this topic is mainly focused on commons and has significantly ignored the existing regulatory constraints between both the regimes. Therefore, in this study relevant WTO and environmental laws are critically examined in order to bring another side of literally work on trade‐climate policy framework. Moreover, the time factor, role of developing countries and two approaches are also discussed that are important constituents to be considered during ongoing climate change multilateral talks.

This paper has six parts in total. Part one comprises of “Introduction”, part two gives “Overview of relevant WTO and climate change regulations”, part three describes “Antithesis of WTO and climate change rules” and explains the differences that both regimes posses in the basics of their nature, part four enumerates that how to galvanize the anticipated disputes among both the regimes, part five is focused on the participation of developing countries and their possible reservations towards climate policy and, part six gives some concluding remarks.

This study found four major points of caution while architecting climate change policy. First, the climate change policy gives excuse to certain economies to protect their domestic industry, which is supposedly the violation of WTO rules. Second, the disputes arise at WTO platform from the climate friendly trade policies would be a new inconvincible challenge. Third, the GATT article XX (general exceptions) and agreement on subsidies and countervailing measures (ASCM) are still not clearly defined under climate change regime. Fourth, the position of least developed countries (LDCs), there is no action plan as these countries are the most affected due to possible stringent trade‐climate policies.

This research posses potential policy implication for both governments and international organizations, and provides new direction to trade and climate change researchers. It opens the way to critically examine the legal issues addressed in this paper which subsequently help both trade climate change regimes to overcome such regulatory differences with mutual consensus.

As policy implication this study suggests that what has been achieved during last two decades over climate change issue, and how long would it take to achieve the reasonable targets? In‐fact, the past work has succeeded to address the climate change as the global issue and it needs to be solved jointly but there is still a long way to make potential progress in order to architect the comprehensive policy and designing of multilateral agreements. It needs more time to constitute a climate change regime free from individual countries' political and economical interests and consensus amongst all major countries and group.

Most the current literature only focuses common options between trade and climate change policy regimes and significantly ignores the potential legal constraints. In this regards, this study fills existing gap in trade and climate change policy constraints and gives another new direction for policy makers.

In February 2010, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an interpretive release clarifying the information that registrants should disclose about climate change in their annual filings. Based on the industries the European Union targeted for its cap-and-trade carbon trading mechanism, this study investigates climate change disclosures for Fortune 500 firms operating in these same sectors. Using an equal-weighting scheme for content analysis of Form 10-Ks from 136 firms, we completed a comparative analysis on the extensiveness of climate change disclosures for the pre- and post-periods surrounding the SEC pronouncement. We observed a statistically significant increase in the disclosure of information related to climate change in 2010 compared to 2008, but no similar effect when comparing 2010–2009 reporting. There was a significant disclosure increase in 2009 compared to 2008. We conclude – based on a hypothesized anticipation of the SEC actually mandating climate change information in filings – that firms augmented their disclosures during 2009 in advance of the official guidance being published. This is a rather significant outcome given the historical lack of environmental disclosure subsequent to previous SEC mandates.

In absence of extensive regulation, expectations can be a noteworthy institutional pressure driving corporate climate change action. The purpose of this study is to explore expectations on businesses to act on climate change when the anticipations for a new global climate agreement are relatively low. Expectations on corporate climate action are compared in two ways: to the previous year, when anticipations for a new international climate treaty were high, and to other categories of societal actors.

This paper builds on a questionnaire handed out to an élite sample of 205 participants at the UN climate conference COP16/CMP6 in Cancún 2010, when anticipations were low for regulatory breakthrough in the international climate negotiations.

The responses suggest that expectations on businesses in 2010 did not decrease compared to 2009, when anticipations were high for regulatory breakthrough. A total of 40 percent of the respondents indicated that their expectations had increased since the previous year. Expectations on businesses were relatively high compared to other societal actors; and the highest expectations were expressed by businesses themselves.

The results provide an empirical foundation which stimulates thinking around expectations that make up an important component in the business environment. It is the first systematic ranking of expectations on business to act on climate change among participants at the UN climate change conference, one of the most prominent arenas in the field. The timing for the data collection provides a unique opportunity to analyse how expectations are related to different levels of regulatory anticipation.