Towards a relational view of corporate governance to preserve the biosphere

Résumé En

Given the ecological emergency, companies have to consider the interests of the biosphere in their decision-making processes. Protecting the biosphere implies adopting a vision of the world in which this sphere embraces and restricts the social sphere, which itself frames the economic sphere, and in which all human and non-human actors should be considered (Petit et al., 2022). We show that recent developments in French corporate governance practices, while allowing them to better address ecological issues, do not embrace this worldview developed by the field of Ecological Economics that we adopt in this article. According to this framework, corporate governance needs to include representatives of the biosphere in its decision-making structures, which poses challenges insofar as it implies allowing non-humans to have their say. Several proposals have been put forward to "green" companies by including employees, local populations or scientists in their decision-making processes. We show that each category of stakeholder cannot ensure the representation of the biosphere's interests on its own. Since talking about the biosphere implies considering the interdependencies within it, only a diverse collective, a common, seems relevant to represent its interests. However, giving a place to biosphere representatives does not prefigure the real political power of these representatives over corporate decisions. As the consensus-building process tends to lead to the triumph of economic interests over ecological interests (Nyberg and Wright, 2013), it seems justified to us to allow a veto right to these representatives, in line with Banerjee's (2018) proposals.