Strategic Leadership of Biodiversity in Companies – A Grounded Maturity Model

While business is a key driver of biodiversity loss, management research and corporate practice have been slow in recognising this crisis. Extant research has focused on incremental corporate means of addressing biodiversity, whether via reporting or measurement. In this paper, we engaged in an explorative, grounded theory research design to appreciate how companies address biodiversity in their business.

We focused our analysis on the food sector, ranking among the sectors contributing most to biodiversity loss worldwide. Our qualitative study consisted in 46 in-depth interviews with business leaders from 37 companies, theoretically sampled to represent the Finnish food sector.

Our main finding is in developing a grounded maturity model portraying how companies’ approaches to addressing biodiversity in business are not uniform. We identified four maturity categories — forerunners, awakened ones, followers and laggards, which represent the maturity levels of the studied companies as regards how they addressed biodiversity in their business. Taking a closer look, each maturity category reflects a different approach regarding the companies’ strategic leadership of biodiversity, i.e. leadership on the one hand, and strategic management of biodiversity on the other hand.

Notwithstanding, our second, related finding, is in offering a grounded conceptualization highlighting that companies need to approach biodiversity from the perspectives of both leadership and strategic management. Paralleling decisions on ‘what’ strategy to adopt vis-à-vis biodiversity, also the question of ‘how’ needs to be addressed. Our findings posit ‘leadership for biodiversity’ to consist in a company’s attitude, responsibility, agency toward biodiversity as well as collaboration in addressing biodiversity loss. All the while, we found ‘the strategic management of biodiversity’ to relate to how biodiversity is perceived in a company, whether biodiversity-related goals have been set and resources allocated for this purpose, and further, what kind of management style is used in this endeavour. In summary, our conceptualization posits that addressing biodiversity requires an organisation-wide approach combining both leadership and strategic management.

Overall, we show food sector companies’ slow awakening toward addressing biodiversity. As regards business implications, the developed maturity model offers a developmental lever for companies, as they engage in the transformative change needed to address biodiversity loss.