A socio-ecological approach to corporate governance

There is considerable evidence that we are living through a time of unprecedented inter-connected changes in earth systems: including climate, water and biological systems. These changes have implications for how we organise our economies and affect the way in which humans live. The term used to describe this situation is ‘the Anthropocene’ and this refers to the situation where human activity drives global environmental change. We use this Anthropocene framing to characterise the interdependent relationship between the social and the ecological systems and to locate the role of corporate governance in this context. We describe this as a socio-ecological approach and use this to reflect upon how both the owner-manager interface might change as well as how a company interacts with a wider stakeholder community. We propose three elements underpinning a socio-ecological form of corporate governance: biosphere stewardship, adaptive and transformative governance routines and global/regional governance infrastructure linked to corporate scale levels.