What is the Strategy of Strategy to Tackle Climate Change?

Abstract

To effectively tackle climate change, the strategic management enterprise needs to fundamentally reinvent itself. In their Point, Bansal, Durand, Kreutzer, Kunisch and McGahan forcefully argue for such a turnaround and outline a ‘new strategy’ paradigm that integrates the constraints of planetary boundaries and Earth systems not as an afterthought, but as the basis of inquiry. This, however, doesn't come without fierce contestation, as shown by the Counterpoint by Foss and Klein and the further Counterpoint by Davis and DeWitt. In this introduction to the Point-Counterpoint debate on strategic management and climate change, we argue that this contestation is largely due to what we call three epistemic fault lines that cut through how strategy scholars understand climate change, devise possible solutions, and assume the relationship between theories and reality. We specify these fault lines and connect them to important avenues for future research that expand the strategic management conversation about climate change.