MNES and climate change : exploring institutional failures and embeddedness

This paper explores how climate change affects MNEs, focusing on the challenges they face in overcoming liabilities and filling institutional voids related to the issue. Climate change is characterized by institutional failures because there is neither an enforceable global agreement nor a market morality. Climate change is also a distinctive 'international business' issue as its institutional failures materialize differently in different countries. As governments are still highly involved, MNEs need to carefully consider their strategies to cope with nonmarket forces, including their embeddedness in multiple institutional settings. Using some illustrative examples of MNE responses to climate-related components in stimulus packages, we explore MNEs' balancing act concerning their institutional embeddedness (or lack thereof) in home, host and supranational contexts as input for further research on the dynamics of MNE activities in relation to climate change