Scaling Sustainability: Regulation and Resilience in Managerial Responses to Climate Change

Abstract

This paper introduces the special issue of the British Journal of Management on ‘Scaling Sustainability: Regulation and Resilience in Managerial Responses to Climate Change’, providing an overview of the key issues in scaling sustainability, comprising an analysis of the six papers in the special issue. We discuss the complex relationship between micro, meso and macro scales, in the context of organizations’, managers’ and consumers’ complicity in the creation and intensification of climate-changing conditions. In networking multiple sites into a ‘global’ scale, managers and organizations can lose sight of the situated, localized nature of the position from which they perform the global. We conclude that a key factor in the capacity and speed at which local actions can be scaled up is the connection of sustainability-related activities by intermediary organizations that can generate resonance between multiple sites through association or alliance, rather than imposing a single logic. Thus, more resilient approaches, which acknowledge the significance of the interconnection between scales, are required to effectively scale sustainability strategies upwards or downwards.