Why research matters to Climate Change Leadership
Climate Change Leadership (CCL) is developing from a broad collection of ideas about sustainable, environmental, responsible and ethical leadership into a more coherent, evidence-informed field concerned with how leaders, teams and organisations respond to and mitigate climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological degradation.
The research base is growing, but it remains fragmented. Existing research examines a variety of independent variables including sustainable leadership, environmental leadership, environmentally specific transformational leadership, responsible leadership, green leadership, systems leadership, pro-environmental behaviour, sustainability mindsets and organisational governance. These approaches provide important evidence, but they often use different definitions, measures and outcome criteria. CCL seeks to integrate them into a multi-level model of leadership that can be tested against meaningful organisational and ecological outcomes (MacKie, 2023, 2026).
Research Matters therefore asks whether particular leadership capacities and organisational structures can be shown to produce measurable changes in sustainable behaviour, decisions, systems and environmental impact.
Leadership across individual, team and organisational levels
Much sustainability leadership research has concentrated on individual executives. Yet leadership in complex organisations is distributed across teams, functions, informal leaders, boards and networks. The current CCL model therefore examines leadership at three connected levels:
- Individual: values, virtues, sustainability mindsets, environmentally specific leadership, systems thinking, ethical decision-making and maturity.
- Team: environmental purpose, ecological norms, complementary strengths, informal ecological roles, and distributed, shared and collective leadership.
- Organisation: purpose, strategy, culture, stakeholder inclusion, governance, ecological reflexivity, double materiality and strong sustainability.
This multi-level architecture is important because strong individual intentions can be neutralised by team norms, organisational incentives, short-term performance pressures or weak governance. Conversely, well-designed systems and governance can amplify and sustain pro-environmental leadership across an organisation.
From leadership intentions to meaningful outcomes
A central weakness in the existing literature is the distance between leadership measures and meaningful environmental outcomes. Many studies rely on cross-sectional surveys, self-report data or employee perceptions of leadership. These measures can be useful, but they do not demonstrate that leadership has produced lower emissions, more responsible resource use, improved biodiversity outcomes or ecological regeneration.
CCL therefore places greater emphasis on criterion validity. The ultimate test of Climate Change Leadership is whether changes in leadership can be reliably and validly associated with changes in organisational behaviour and, ultimately, ecological impact. Earlier CCL work identified emissions reduction, responsible consumption and biospheric regeneration as examples of meaningful dependent variables against which post-conventional leadership should be tested (MacKie, 2023).
Barriers to Climate Change Leadership research
Given the scale and urgency of anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss, it might reasonably be expected that research into the leadership required to address these challenges would match their significance. In practice, direct empirical research into the development and effectiveness of Climate Change Leadership remains surprisingly limited.
André et al. (2025) identify several reasons why climate action research remains marginal within mainstream management scholarship. These include a continuing focus on individual and organisational factors rather than systemic challenges, outdated business school pedagogy and curriculum, academic reward systems that favour conventional management topics, publication barriers, and the difficulty of interdisciplinary research. Their analysis suggests that climate research often challenges deeply embedded assumptions about shareholder primacy, economic growth and the role of business itself.
Weak sustainability can reinforce this problem. Landrum (2023) argues that much business education and organisational practice prolongs unsustainability by assuming that incremental improvements to existing business models will be sufficient. If the underlying assumptions remain unchallenged, both research questions and leadership development may become constrained by the same paradigm they are intended to transform.
Climate leadership programmes are ahead of their evaluation
Despite the limited direct research, several programmes and developmental approaches have attempted to build climate and sustainability leadership capability. These include formal teaching programmes in business school settings, specialist leadership programmes, sustainability capability frameworks and climate-focused coaching.
André’s (2020) Lead for the Planet approach identifies five key practices: understanding the science, evaluating climate risks, managing stakeholders, transforming business and engaging global leadership. The programme combines strong sustainability, focused on planetary regeneration rather than incremental business transition, with integrative learning. Jeanrenaud, Jeanrenaud and Gosling (2017) similarly place organisational leadership within a ‘one planet’ frame, while climate coaching has sought to connect individual reflection and development more explicitly with climate action (Cox & Flynn, 2022).
The critical limitation is evaluation. These approaches have not converged around a common set of dependent variables that would allow their effectiveness to be compared. There is still insufficient evidence to recommend one developmental model over another, and the field lacks a consistent evidence chain linking programme participation with subsequent behaviour, organisational decisions and measurable ecological outcomes.