Multilevel Governance, Public Policy, and Global Climate Action

With climate risks growing, climate action facing political headwinds in many countries, and international cooperation increasingly challenged, Lily Hsueh's Corporations at Climate Crossroads illuminates how and under what conditions the world’s largest corporations have taken proactive action on climate change during the years leading up to and after the Paris Agreement. Drawing on insights from economics, political science, and management, Hsueh's political economic framework centers corporations and their leaders as key players in a nested structure of climate change governance. Hsueh shows that corporate leaders' climate actions are shaped by bottom-up and top-down institutions and incentives involving firm, regulatory, and global governance. To navigate uncertainty, corporate responses to the climate challenge are therefore an interplay of internal firm leadership, complementary capabilities in adjacent areas, and strategic and proactive engagement with regulatory process and global governance. Sophisticated large-N statistical analyses of global businesses’ climate mitigation and performance from 2011 to 2020 and illustrative company case studies substantiate the demand for, and supply of, global businesses’ climate mitigation, across sectors, and in developed and developing countries. 

Lily Hsueh is Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Arizona State University, where she is also a Senior Global Futures Scientist at the ASU Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. She is an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. She is the author of Corporations at Climate Crossroads: Multilevel Governance, Public Policy, and Global Climate Action (MIT Press, 2025), and numerous scholarly articles on business and public policy, environmental economics, policy, and governance, and political economy. Her work has been featured in the Financial Times, Fortune, PBS NewsHour, among other media outlets. She holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree from University College London, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. 

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