Corporate responsibility and the state: business lobbying on climate change in the UK

Abstract To what extent are the lobbying positions of large corporations consistent with the increasingly prominent corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments that these organizations champion? Are corporations with more stringent internal sustainability policies more likely to support state regulation to address related social and environmental challenges? Or do these companies use their CSR credentials to engage in deregulatory lobbying as some greenwashing accounts imply? We address this question by examining the testimony given by representatives of FTSE 350 companies to UK parliamentary committees scrutinizing climate change policy—a core sustainability issue—between 2005 and 2019. Using publicly available ratings of the companies’ environmental, social and governance practices we compare how high and low CSR companies testified in front of these legislative committees. We find that companies with stronger CSR commitments are more likely to support state interventions into the market to combat climate change, offer policymakers clearer justifications for their policy stances and include higher quality policy-related evidence in their testimony; these differences remain consistent and increase across the 14-year period analyzed. In short, CSR credentials appear to be a credible signal of greater support for state action on climate change and higher quality lobbying.