Beyond the Corporate Nature Blindspot: Social-Ecological Capability in Green Transitions
Journal
Strategic Management Society
Type
conference contribution
Date Issued
2026-10-18
Author(s)
Abstract
The 2026 SMS conference theme, ‘Strategy in a Fragmented Geo-Economic Landscape: Bridging Divides Across Markets, Institutions, and Technology,’ provides a timely context for rethinking how strategy responds to biodiversity loss, renewable energy expansion, and ecological instability. As firms operate across fragmented regulatory regimes, contested local landscapes, and increasingly complex stakeholder networks, traditional firm-centric models of environmental strategy are under growing strains. This panel addresses what we call the corporate nature blindspot: the tendency in strategic management to treat nature as a passive backdrop to be managed through efficiency, risk reduction, or compliance, rather than as a dynamic social-ecological system that shapes organizational legitimacy, resilience, and long-term value creation.
The panel revisits the Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV) as an influential foundation for research on environmental strategy in strategic management, while arguing that its dominant applications have remained too narrowly focused on firm-bounded capabilities. Such approaches are increasingly insufficient for addressing biodiversity loss, ecosystem interdependence, and the governance changes of contemporary business environments. In response, the panel advances the concept of Social-Ecological Capability: the capacity of firms to create value and resilience through coordination across ecological, institutional, financial, and community systems rather than through internal environmental routines alone.
The UK solar sector provides a revealing empirical setting for this discussion. As renewable energy infrastructure expands, firms face growing ‘green-on-green’ tensions in which climate mitigation goals come into conflict with local ecological conservation. These tensions are especially visible under the UK’s mandatory 10% Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirement, and stakeholder engagement. In context, biodiversity is no longer a generic sustainability concern; it becomes a strategic and operational issue requiring coordination among developers, investors, regulators, ecologists, local communities, and other partners.
The panel is organized around four linked themes. First, it reconsiders how the NRBV might evolve in a context of socio-ecological fragility and interdependence. Second, it examines whether current corporate nature strategies represent genuine transformation or a renewed business-case logic shaped by measurement and accountability pressures. Third, it explores how firms develop social-ecological capabilities in response to nature/biodiversity pressures, including instrumental, integrative and ecosystem-based strategic orientations. Fourth, it brings in practitioner insight from renewable energy development to show how biodiversity is operationalised in real projects through investment decisions, compliance processes, stakeholder relationships, and long-term ecological management.
By bringing together scholars of environmental strategy, capabilities and biodiversity governance with a practitioner from the renewable energy and finance sectors, the panel contributes to strategy research in three ways. It extends the NRBV beyond firm-centric efficiency logics, introduces Social-Ecological Capability as a system-oriented lens for understanding competitive advantage, and offers empirical and practical insight into one of the central contradictions of the green transition: how firms can pursue decarbonisation without deepening ecological degradation. Overall, the session aims to stimulate dialogue on how strategy can move from efficiency toward regeneration.
The panel revisits the Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV) as an influential foundation for research on environmental strategy in strategic management, while arguing that its dominant applications have remained too narrowly focused on firm-bounded capabilities. Such approaches are increasingly insufficient for addressing biodiversity loss, ecosystem interdependence, and the governance changes of contemporary business environments. In response, the panel advances the concept of Social-Ecological Capability: the capacity of firms to create value and resilience through coordination across ecological, institutional, financial, and community systems rather than through internal environmental routines alone.
The UK solar sector provides a revealing empirical setting for this discussion. As renewable energy infrastructure expands, firms face growing ‘green-on-green’ tensions in which climate mitigation goals come into conflict with local ecological conservation. These tensions are especially visible under the UK’s mandatory 10% Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirement, and stakeholder engagement. In context, biodiversity is no longer a generic sustainability concern; it becomes a strategic and operational issue requiring coordination among developers, investors, regulators, ecologists, local communities, and other partners.
The panel is organized around four linked themes. First, it reconsiders how the NRBV might evolve in a context of socio-ecological fragility and interdependence. Second, it examines whether current corporate nature strategies represent genuine transformation or a renewed business-case logic shaped by measurement and accountability pressures. Third, it explores how firms develop social-ecological capabilities in response to nature/biodiversity pressures, including instrumental, integrative and ecosystem-based strategic orientations. Fourth, it brings in practitioner insight from renewable energy development to show how biodiversity is operationalised in real projects through investment decisions, compliance processes, stakeholder relationships, and long-term ecological management.
By bringing together scholars of environmental strategy, capabilities and biodiversity governance with a practitioner from the renewable energy and finance sectors, the panel contributes to strategy research in three ways. It extends the NRBV beyond firm-centric efficiency logics, introduces Social-Ecological Capability as a system-oriented lens for understanding competitive advantage, and offers empirical and practical insight into one of the central contradictions of the green transition: how firms can pursue decarbonisation without deepening ecological degradation. Overall, the session aims to stimulate dialogue on how strategy can move from efficiency toward regeneration.
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
Yes
Subject(s)
Division(s)