Aligning climate policy with energy justice through remedial stakeholder theory

We contribute to this special issue by exploring climate policy and energy justice through the lens of remedial stakeholder theory. While stakeholder theory traditionally focuses on present and forward-looking relationships, we argue that climate change and the energy transition provide a compelling case to examine the nexus of past, present, and future organisational action. Many energy companies, which are legally incorporated entities (in some cases with more than one hundred years of existence), have accumulated substantial profits through business models that externalised the environmental costs of greenhouse gas emissions, with particularly negative effects on the countries that contributed the least to them. These emissions have significantly contributed to human-induced climate change, which is projected to plunge millions further into climate-related poverty, particularly in vulnerable and low-income communities. To address this challenge, we propose an extended view of stakeholder theory—remedial stakeholder theory—as a normative framework that spotlights organisational responsibility for historical environmental harms. This model urges firms, especially in the energy sector, to acknowledge and remediate past contributions to climate change by centring reparative practices in their transition strategies. Remedial stakeholder theory connects with climate policy by offering a foundation for designing policies and corporate responses that go beyond distributive fairness in the present to include procedural and restorative justice over time. In doing so, our paper provides a lens to assess how climate and energy policies can more equitably address the burdens and benefits of the energy transition.