The first business and biodiversity assessment by the Intergovernmental Science‑Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services concludes that voluntary corporate action cannot halt biodiversity loss without broader shifts in the policy, economic, financial, social, and knowledge systems that shape business behavior and environmental outcomes. Yet management research on biodiversity remains largely firm-centric, attending to what individual firms measure, disclose, and do, while often overlooking these wider systems. We propose four interrelated research priorities to reorient the field: the political economy of inaction, the limits of organizational capability, the viability of organizing beyond growth, and reconceptualizing the firm–nature relationship. Pursuing them requires research that is interdisciplinary—drawing on insights beyond management—and transdisciplinary, co‑producing decision‑relevant knowledge with the actors who shape and experience biodiversity outcomes.
Despite decades of research on greenwashing, existing measurement models struggle to distinguish intentional deception from poor performance or to account for how stakeholders interpret corporate claims. This study introduces the Greenwashing Index (GWI), a validated, multidimensional framework that addresses this challenge by integrating linguistic deception (via Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based natural language processing), verified performance data (e.g., Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) violations), and stakeholder credibility assessments across investors, consumers, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The GWI identifies 83% of regulator-sanctioned firms and correlates strongly with stakeholder-rated greenwashing severity ( r = .71). Cluster analysis reveals four behavioural archetypes, while cross-stakeholder results show NGOs are significantly more punitive than investors. A post-2020 rise in selective disclosure reflects firms’ strategic adaptation to evolving ESG pressures. By bridging intent, action, and perception, the GWI represents a paradigm shift, transforming greenwashing detection from subjective suspicion into scientific diagnosis.
This study examines how supervisor bottom-line mentality (SBLM) shapes the ethical climate needed for environmental responsibility in logistics firms. Drawing on ethical climate theory (ECT) and self-determination theory (SDT), it argues that performance-focused supervisory signals weaken the moral conditions through which employees uphold environmental and compliance duties. Using time-lagged survey data from 379 employees in Pakistan’s logistics sector and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), results show that SBLM weakens workplace ethical climate directly and indirectly through moral disengagement. Job autonomy buffers these effects by reducing employees’ tendency to justify questionable operational choices under pressure. The findings reposition ethical climate as a workplace foundation for managing organizations’ environmental impact, showing that sustainability implementation depends not only on policies and reporting systems but also on moral regulation and autonomy in daily operations.
Existing models for circular economy are typically designed for firms, often overlooking alternative governance structures, traditional knowledge, and collective decision-making that shape community-based organizations. Yet these organizations are key to conserving fragile ecosystems and supporting sustainable production, as their products and raw materials integrate into industrial value chains. This article examines how community-based organizations develop dynamic capabilities to engage in circular economy initiatives through a multiple case study of two regions in the Brazilian Amazon. The findings reveal that sensing is often grounded in collective, traditional, and place-based knowledge; seizing is driven by community needs and experimentation with external knowledge; and reconfiguring occurs through collective governance arrangements, internalizing circular economy practices and maintaining autonomy. This article extends the literature beyond firm contexts by showing how circular economy capabilities can emerge through polycentric and collaborative governance and have strong ecological embeddedness, making their capabilities less dependent on firm-based structures and knowledge.
This viewpoint develops the concept of carbon subsumption - the process through which sustainability governance privileges carbon as the dominant representation of environmental performance, rendering biodiversity visible only when it can be accommodated within carbon-based forms of evaluation. We argue that carbon dominates because it provides a universal, fungible unit which enables comparison, aggregation, and trading across firms and contexts, whereas biodiversity remains context-specific, non-fungible, and difficult to translate into comparable units. We identify three mechanisms through which carbon subsumption operates: assimilation, where biodiversity is reduced to carbon value; subordination, where biodiversity is marginalised within aggregated Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics; and exclusion, where biodiversity falls outside carbon accounting boundaries. This produces a governance paradox: environmental performance becomes comparable and auditable by suppressing ecological complexity. We conclude that sustainability governance should focus less on integrating biodiversity into carbon-centred systems and more on making carbon-biodiversity trade-offs visible.
