In the context of earth system governance today, experimentation is no longer merely a virtue but a basic survival skill.Administrative professionals – understood to include administrators national, international, and subnational, both governmental and nongovernmental, across the entire range of policy arenas – are in a position to engage in this best practice for learning from experience, perhaps to a greater degree than any other agents of governance. Protected by both their relative anonymity and their institutional affiliations, they enjoy the dual benefits of relative invisibility and administrative discretion.Administrative professionals can experiment with social and political arrangements that are not only adaptive but are also democratic and effective in reconciling humans to their environment.The volatility of their environments has meant that they face devolved responsibility in governance for both acquiring resources and achieving results.Administrative professionals succeed by being scavengers par excellence, such that approaches that work well anywhere are destined eventually to be tried everywhere.

To endure, policies and institutions that both protect the environment and promote human security must have an architecture based on principles that lead to creation and maintenance of a rational relationship between human places and human practices.Flexibility and open texture allow meaning to change and endure over time, as both times and people change, and to remain embedded in its cultural context.In every corner of the globe, people have devised small pieces of institutional architecture that show remarkable creativity and potential for expansion.The objective should not be replicating these experiences at grander and higher scales, nor achieving greater levels of consistency or integration in governance architecture.Instead, consilience is what should be sought in our environmental governance architecture – a greater level of coherence in our knowledge.This is the level of democratic discourse, which depends on a more solid and substantive level of explanation – grounded in holistic social experimentation – for both its subject matter and its evaluative criteria.

This concluding chapter ties together the various elements of regulatory and market-based developments covered earlier in the book and the impacts they have on dominant corporate norms. International consensus shifting on climate change indicates that these dominant theories and norms have become outdated, and should be adapted to reflect broader public and private investor concerns around climate change. The systemic risks of climate change are proving to be a market driver for reallocation of capital away from fossil fuel assets and towards a low or no carbon economy. Companies themselves are reacting with net-zero emissions targets, although these approaches mainly cabin climate concerns to risk-based approaches. This chapter argues that public regulation is still needed to ensure corporate climate action protects not only profits but the public. It ends with two areas of likely future regulatory development – standardised disclosure obligations for companies on climate risk, as well as governance and strategy making by companies on climate change. It also advocates that companies hire climate expertise on an either an ad hoc or permanent basis to help directors reimagine the corporate purpose in the Anthropocene.

The chapter begins with the historic announcement by then UK Prime Minister Theresa May of a net-zero emissions target. It looks at the theory of regulation as applied to companies, and EU and UK energy and climate law in particular. With a focus on the Climate Change Act 2008, this chapter highlights some of the unique characteristics of the independent and expert-based nature of the Committee on Climate Change, and its relationship to climate science. It also looks at the increasing overlap between the reporting requirements on directors under the Companies Act 2006 and the Climate Change Act 2008. It focuses on the desire for a ‘Green Brexit’ as the motivation behind the UK Environmental Bill 2020, the Clean Growth Strategy and plans for a UK emissions trading system. The chapter includes a section on energy companies’ evolving approach to climate and energy regulation, with a focus on market-based mechanisms like the EU emissions trading system and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.

This chapter provides a deep dive into UK company law, assessing the common law before the changes to the Companies Act enacted in 2006. It finds that prior to 2006, the judiciary provided directors with a significant amount of discretion to make even profit-sacrificing actions if they benefited the company as a whole, widely reflecting the entity theory of companies. Corporate governance reviews, from the Cadbury Report onwards, did not reflect this common law approach. A detailed examination of the work of the Company Law Review Steering Group illustrates that the changes codified in s172 of the Companies Act 2006 actually entrenched a shareholder primacy approach to company law that previously was not dominant in English common law. This development could have negative impacts for the climate, although the relationship between s172 and the prior common law interpretation of directors’ duties remains unclear. Post-2006 cases are also assessed, and an overview of where climate liability could arise for directors under the 2006 Act is provided.

If there is no corner of the natural world that is beyond human influence, then no corner of the world lies beyond the human responsibility implied by our moral agency.The question of agency is critical to any strategy of global political transformation one might imagine.Agency is not merely a matter of knowledge (beginning with self-knowledge) or autonomy (as the absence of restraint or coercion) or both.Effective practice presumes capability.For an agent to be held responsible, the capability of effective action must exist.Agents of governance are not merely political actors.They are, rather, any authoritative actors who have both the legitimacy and capacity to act.The agency of those outside of the core governance institutions and processes should not be limited to a support role.Doing so both degrades the quality of decision-making and marginalizes those whose agency should be enhanced by self-governance.

Chapter 2 assesses dominant corporate theories and norms such as shareholder primacy and shareholder wealth maximisation through the lens of climate change. It describes the ascent to dominance of these theories through the historical diversification of shareholder ownership and issue of agency costs. It highlights the three major negative contributions these theories have made to the issue of climate change: the elevation of the interests of shareholders to the detriment of non-shareholders, the fostering on a short-term approach to profit-making and finally the externalization of greenhouse gas emissions. The chapter then assesses competing theories of the corporate form which focus on stakeholder interests and the company as an entity, and how these theories provide a more holistic and appropriate model of the company in the context of climate change. The chapter concludes with the UK enlightened shareholder value approach and the US shareholder-centric approach to company law. While the United States has a more entrenched version of these dominant corporate theories such as shareholder wealth maximisation, even in this jurisdiction recent developments such as the Business Roundtable statement in 2019 illustrate discursive movements away from a shareholder-centric approach in the business world.

Access and allocation firmly ground the concept of human security in the larger context of social justice, posing serious challenges for equitable earth system governance.The focus on capabilities brings together a range of ideas addressed inadequately in traditional approaches to the economics of welfare. The capabilities approach highlights the importance of real freedoms in the assessment of persons’ relative level of advantage, promoting a more realistic balance of materialistic and non-materialistic factors in evaluating human welfare and a concern for the distribution of substantive opportunities within society.Research on access to and allocation of environmental resources in a deliberative system of democratic governance builds on and extends an existing limited research literature on the implications of deliberative democratic practices for environmental justice policy and governance.More equitable access to and allocation of environmental “goods” should be a focus for a next generation of environmental research characterized by improved normative understanding as well as more meaningful and reflexive potential for sustainability transformation.

The concept of consensus must be understood in a more complex and contingent way than it often is.Consensus is that level of agreement among all parties to the decision process that allows them to “hang together” as they move from one stage of that process to the next.Consensus in governance is not, and never could be usefully thought of as, synonymous with simple unanimity.The major elements of consensus – the normative, the political, and the social – all relate to different kinds of agreement, each with its own regulative standard.

Analysis of the concept of transparency provides an illustration of the role of consensus in democratic earth system governance, which must confront five core analytical problems identified in the first Science Plan of the Earth System Governance Project: architecture, adaptiveness, accountability, access and allocation, and agency.The character of each distinct analytical problem of governance places its own demands and limitations on governance by transparency policy.

Earth system governance is not for the faint of heart. To a considerable extent, governance is a concept that makes sense only within an established legal framework. A plausible argument can be made that no such framework in its modern, constitutional sense even exists outside the confines of the sovereign nation-state (Rabkin 2005). But international law is a complex system of treaties, institutions, and informal governing arrangements that already does exhibit adaptive self-organizing and emergent properties (Kim and Mackey 2014). Greater adaptive capacity might be found, however, by increased reliance on the development of law that is consciously experimental, equivocal, and embedded – a pattern of international law development based on a legal tradition, no less primitive than is contemporary international law, from which emerged a system of law that built an empire and today governs (in whole or part) the lives of nearly 40 percent of the world’s population. This tradition traces the law back, not to scriptural duties or sovereign declarations, but to a gradual and organic accretion of precedent – a process that, more easily than most others, might be imagined as a pattern for the development of global and international law that is truly equivocal, experimental, and embedded.

This introductory chapter frames the issue of companies and their role in the climate crisis. It lays out the science of climate change and the causal connection between the historic and present contributions of companies to climate change through their greenhouse gas emissions. The chapter highlights the global temperature goals under the Paris Agreement and the consequential emission reductions it necessitates. This chapter also introduces some key concepts in company law theory such as shareholder primacy and shareholder wealth maximization and their role in Anglo-American company law. The chapter provides an explanation of a number of corporate forms, including traditional for-profit corporate models (both private and public) as well as a variety of hybrid and social enterprise forms. The imperatives of profit making, as illustrated by dominant corporate norms, are relevant (in varying degrees) to all of these corporate forms. The chapter concludes with a summary of systemic barriers of short-termism as well as opportunities such as corporate social responsibility and societal expectations which surround companies in the context of climate change, and why the United Kingdom is used as a model jurisdiction.