Towards strategic stakeholder management? Integrating perspectives on sustainability challenges such as corporate responses to climate change

The strategic management of corporate sustainability tends to be approached from one theoretical perspective in academic research and publications in mainstream journals simultaneously. In corporate practice, however, a sustainability issue has different dimensions that cannot be captured if only one such lens is taken. The purpose of this article is to develop a more integrated perspective, embedded in a stakeholder view.

This paper uses climate change as an example to illustrate how institutional, resource‐based, supply chain and stakeholder views are all important to characterize and understand corporate strategic responses to one issue. This is subsequently linked to the climate strategies and related capabilities of companies, reckoning with societal and competitive contexts.

What a corporate climate strategy looks like depends on the type of stakeholders that a company manages more proactively, which is in turn determined by the extent to which these stakeholders control critical resources.

While empirical literature usually adopts a particular theoretical perspective, this article has attempted to develop a more integrative approach on corporate responses to climate change.