So, can a business manager be a climate activist?

Who is a climate activist?

When it comes to climate activism, people normally think of Greta Thunberg, Fridays for Future strikers, or members of Extinction Rebellion. They are loud, often dress up, show placards, and use social media extensively – they want to be heard and seen. And rightly so. This form of street-based civil society action has been around for a long time, and it is vitally important, in a democracy, for people to be able to exercise their rights to freedom of speech.

But is this all there is in terms of climate activism? We don’t think so.

As we show in our new book, Climate Activism: How Communities Take Renewable Energy Actions Across Business and Society, activism has transformed and is now going on literally everywhere – inside and across small and large corporations, local and national state agencies, NGOs of all sizes, and local prosumer groups in town and villages.

Climate villains in the boardroom?

Multinational companies, particularly those operating in the oil and gas industry, are often vilified for having caused climate change. It is well documented that executives at ExxonMobil, for example, first knew about climate change science in the 1970s, yet chose not to change their business model. Instead, the company decided to fund climate change sceptic groups, contributing to decades of inaction on climate change. Such malpractices are despicable and important to call out, which their new board member, the shareholder activist Kaisa Hietela, has decisively done.

In addition to new forms of investor activism, there are many people working in the corporate world – some of them in very senior positions – who use their careers as springboards for bringing about positive change. For example, Juliet Davenport, who set up Good Energy, a leading renewable energy company, explicitly sees her role to help the UK transition towards a decarbonised economy.

Equally, Dale Vince, who founded Ecotricity in 1995, saw his then hippie lifestyle as not enough. He decided to set up a renewable energy company to change an entire industry. Both of these green entrepreneurs have certainly succeeded, with both Good Energy and Ecotricity now being amongst the largest renewable energy companies in the UK, and the country’s entire energy mix now dominated by renewables.

Insider activists

Yet, beyond the corporate heroes and leaders there are often the quiet ones that make a real difference. As we show in our book’s case study of Vattenfall, there are often many so-called insider activists who, through their everyday working practices, help to transform not only their organisation but the energy system from within. At the time of our study, Vattenfall was a big carbon emitter, yet many people inside the company purposively and steadily kept working on green projects beyond the top-down demands, to make amends and alter – even by walking up the stairs, instead of taking the lift – to make a difference.

Every large company is likely to have such insider activists working towards wider societal or environmental goals they passionately believe in. Even in ExxonMobil there will be many people who would not necessarily see themselves as climate activists but who would certainly try, as best as they can, to work towards positive, environmental change. In their spare time, they might even be involved in climate-related community groups or NGOs or even street-based activism. Human resources managers need to understand that such employees don’t somehow shut their environmental beliefs out of their working lives. No, they do what they can within the company, pushing for change.

A global knowledge community

Climate change is such a ubiquitous phenomenon that it is affecting all aspects of business and society. It would be ludicrous to think that activism somehow is limited to street-based civic action. We show in the book that we can find climate activists in all sorts of organisational settings. We interviewed employees in a local governmental council, for example, who clearly used their institutional positions to bring about social and environmental change through business and citizen groups. We also talked with, what we call, prosumer groups who set up renewable energy cooperatives via collaborations with businesses, seeking to take action on climate change into their own hands.

So, no, climate activism is not only happening on the streets. It is pursued in diverse ways, and sometimes in very unexpected corners of organisations. In our book, we call this an ‘epistemic community’, which can be thought of as a global knowledge movement that is connected by the conviction that responses to climate change need urgent renewable energy action to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. This is a global community that exists through a new sort of ‘togetherness’, which is driven by a strong belief in renewable energy technology combined with social innovations that can elicit change, not only of the energy system, but the wider economic system too.

So, what can I do?

Well, if you consider yourself to be one of these internal climate activists, working perhaps in a large organisation that doesn’t always hear you, then, rest assured, you are not alone. You could team up with fellow climate activists inside and outside your organisation – strength through numbers.

If you are a manager or senior leader of an organisation, then you need to realise that climate change really matters to a lot of your employees. If you want to keep their passion, creativity and initiative in your team, then you need to engage with these internal activists.

Climate change is by far one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced and our book, Climate Activism, will hopefully provide some insights into how anyone, working in any sort of organisation, can get involved and make a difference.