Making Climate Count: The Construction and Consequences of Climate Metrics in Corporate Climate Governance

• In Event: The Sociology of Climate Change

Abstract

A central challenge in the energy transition is measuring and governing corporate responsibility for climate change in the absence of binding constraints on fossil fuel production and emissions. Drawing on 106 interviews with sustainability professionals, investors, regulators, and standard-setters, 15 months of participant observation, and analysis of public documents, this paper extends theories of legal endogeneity and commensuration to analyze the institutionalization and consequences of corporate climate disclosure, which is a cornerstone of corporate climate governance where firms measure and disclose climate metrics around emissions, targets, and risks to investors and financial regulators. The construction of climate metrics around financial logics shapes their organizational implementation, and ultimately, constrains the available pathways for corporate decarbonization. At the field level, I trace how climate finance practitioners repurposed financial disclosure to incorporate quantified climate information, reframing climate change into financial risk. Inside firms, I show how sustainability teams built data infrastructures to collect and centralize climate metrics, but in ways that tightly coupled sustainability to financial reporting while distancing it from operational units responsible for decarbonization. These findings illuminate how the politics of climate governance necessarily include the politics of data: climate disclosure became central to corporate climate governance through specific choices about how to value and quantify climate metrics, and those choices shape what counts and what is possible for corporate climate action.

Author

• Janna Zou Huang, University of California-Berkeley