The oil and gas sector: from climate laggard to climate leader?

ABSTRACT

The oil and gas industry has traditionally been reticent to engage with the issues surrounding climate change, typically being cast as a laggard. Yet, over recent years, the sector has begun taking on a more active role in climate governance, doing so in a variety of capacities – as initiators, catalysts and participants in industry-led or multi-stakeholder efforts. The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative is reviewed, as a case study to illustrate emerging climate leadership within the global oil and gas industry. In 2015, its members committed to a two-degree pathway. The paucity of research on the nascent role of oil and gas firms in climate governance is addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• oil and gas
• governance
• leadership
• non-state actors
• energy transition

Introduction

‘Fossils’, ‘merchants of doubt’, ‘polluters’ are the terms that we mostly associate with the oil and gas industry in relation to climate change. Indeed, the industry has done much to deserve such labels. As early as 1989, just 1 year after the establishment of the first global climate-dedicated organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a number of the largest oil and gas and coal firms came together to launch the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an advocacy group dedicated to promoting climate change scepticism (Brown 2000, Revkin 2009).

Yet, within a decade of the GCC’s founding, cracks in the oil and gas sector’s stance towards climate change became apparent: certain companies, including Shell and BP, two of the largest EU-based international oil companies (IOCs), broke with the organization and aligned themselves with the climate science of the IPCC; others, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, maintained a hard line against climate science and policy (Levy and Kolk 2002). The lengths to which some firms went to discredit climate science have been exposed, as in the case of ExxonMobil (Jennings et al. 2015; Jerving et al. 2015, Liebermann and Rust 2015, Banerjee et al. 2015a, 2015b).

Even if some firms were willing to acknowledge climate science and policy, a more general reluctance to become involved in global efforts to address climate change persisted until recently. An interviewee from a state-owned oil and gas firm argues that the ‘arm’s length’ approach has begun to give way to more active industry involvement, one in which climate change is no longer taken as a pure negative, but is instead seen as an opportunity for the creation of new business units, the development of new technologies and the optimization of existing processes. The majority of interviewees from industry echoed this view; one went so far as to say that they intend to be ‘carbon competitive’. Eikeland and Skjærseth (2019 – this volume), in their study of oil and power industries’ responses to EU emissions trading, further corroborate this sense in noting certain companies’ ‘proactive response strategies’.

This shift can be traced to wider changes, from the rapid rollout of renewable energy technologies to the diffusion of new concepts such as stranded assets (Griffin et al. 2015, van der Ploeg 2016). Of these, the growing involvement of non-state actors in governance processes is particularly significant (Downie 2014, Bäckstrand et al. 2017). As regards firms, this represents a momentous shift: the commonly held view that sustainability represents a challenge to economic growth (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000), and by extension to conventional business models, has become a thing of the past. Major companies have committed to ambitious emissions reduction strategies, and others have banded together in support of climate change mitigation and adaptation (Chan et al. 2015, UNEP 2015, Pattberg and Widerberg 2016).

For the oil and gas industry, the emerging post-Paris world speaks against avoidance as a strategy, especially as the potential cost of inaction swells. Indeed, whereas the world previously lacked credible alternatives to fossil fuels, a future no longer dependent on them has come into sight (e.g. Holland et al. 2016, Papaefthymiou and Dragoon 2016). Firms are now having to consider the very real possibility that oil and gas will no longer play a central role in our energy systems and, worse yet, that they could become locked out of a low-carbon future. Moreover, these changes are threatening the very business models that underpin many of the largest companies (Mitchell et al. 2015, Stevens 2016).

It is in this context that a number of climate-focused governance initiatives have emerged within the sector (Nasiritousi 2017). The earliest, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiatives (OGCI) is a club that brings together 10 of the largest firms, who account for close to 20 per cent of global oil and gas production, as well as nearly 12 per cent of historical greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE). Founded in 2014, and in many ways just starting up, its members have voiced their support for current climate policy and science and have begun to reimagine themselves within a low-carbon energy future.

Though oil and gas firms have become involved in other initiatives¹, here I focus on the OGCI for three reasons: first, it is the only group entirely constituted by industry; second, its members have significant structural power (and therefore, as we will see below, structural leadership potential) – financially, technologically, and also through their GHGE; and third, it has a varied membership, spanning both national and international oil companies in developed and developing contexts, which has the potential to provide clues regarding the convergence or divergence of positions taken by firms within this industry.

Here, I propose to explore: to what extent and under what conditions do oil and gas companies act as climate leaders or pioneers? In searching out answers, I make use of the conceptual framework proposed by Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) to analyse the roles of actors in environmental governance in terms of their positions, motivations, styles and strategies.

The second section offers an overview of the methodological issues encountered in the study of a nascent initiative in the oil and gas sector, as well as some of the conceptual ones related to the use of the framework outlined above. I then present the OGCI in a third section, followed by a discussion of the extent to which, and the conditions under which, the initiative may be acting as a climate leader or pioneer. In conclusion, I reflect on the importance of examining the OGCI, as well as on some of the conceptual limitations of the Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) framework, before attempting to tease out some of this contribution’s broader implications for climate governance.

Methods

Examining the extent to which oil and gas companies act as leaders and the conditions under which this can take place poses several methodological challenges. The first relates to the nature of the selected case, the OGCI, which has only been founded relatively recently, making it challenging to trace processes and provide a longitudinal vision. The framework that Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) put forward assists in this regard by offering a typology built around the concepts of leader and laggard.

The second challenge directly links to the conceptual framework itself, which seeks to distinguish between the internal and external faces of an actor’s environmental ambitions, as a means of determining their position within the leader-laggard typology. This typology was initially put forward in the context of nation-states, and so it is less clear what the specific criteria might be when applied to non-state actors such as firms. This is especially the case in relation to the internal dimension. The majority of publicly available documents and even the statements of interviewees primarily aim at an external audience and may not necessarily genuinely represent internal ambitions.

Furthermore, the OGCI as a nascent initiative has yet to produce extensive materials for analysis, which makes the collection of empirical data all the more crucial. This has been dealt with by combining the analysis of varied sources – websites, videos, media articles, trade publications, social media feeds – with semi-structured interviews carried out between January and June 2016. These involved senior managers from the OGCI and from the firms taking part in it. In order to widen the view somewhat, I carried out additional interviews from January to July 2017 with external stakeholders, whether industry associations or civil society groups. A related difficulty is specifically due to the nature of the oil and gas sector. Given the traditional reluctance of the sector to engage in anything related to climate, we may simply not have the tools to say to what extent these efforts are made in good faith and if they will bear fruit. For this reason, I focus more on the conditions under which the positions of actors occur, rather than speculate about underlying motivations.

The case: the OGCI

In January 2014, the chief executives from some of the world’s largest oil and gas firms gathered on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. They were increasingly concerned about the risks that climate change poses and wanted to position themselves as ‘recognized and ambitious provider[s] of practical solutions for climate change mitigation’ (OGCI 2015). In short, they wanted to be on the right side of a carbon-constrained future.

Led by the Chairman of Saudi Aramco and the CEOs of Total and Eni, the conversation grew into a set of commitments from major national and international oil companies², most notably to support a two-degree target. In September 2014, Khalid A. Al-Falih, the President and CEO of Saudi Aramco, officially announced the OGCI at a UN Climate Summit in New York, portraying it as ‘an example of how the oil and gas industry is positioning itself once again to be the key provider of solutions to global energy challenges’ (UN 2014).

A semi-public technical workshop in Paris in May 2015 first lifted the veil of the inner workings of the OGCI. Led by Gerard Moutet, the chair of the OGCI executive committee and the vice-president of Total for climate and energy, the event gathered views from member companies and selected stakeholders in support of the initiative’s development. It also solicited feedback on a draft report detailing its agenda. In addition, this meeting initiated three ‘work streams’: long-term solutions, the role of natural gas, and instruments and tools for carbon reduction.

One of the goals was clearly to link the OGCI to more established actors in climate governance, notably by inviting two of the UN’s highest authorities – Christiana Figueres (Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC) and Janos Pasztor (Assistant UN Secretary General on Climate Change). OGCI also made a connection to the OECD’s International Energy Agency (IEA) through its head, Fatih Birol.

It was only in October 2015 that the OGCI truly made it into the public eye, when the CEOs of its member companies gathered in Paris ahead of the UNFCCC’s 21^st Conference of the Parties (COP) to present the initiative and a first report setting out its ambitions (OGCI 2015). With such headlines as ‘Oil bosses to meet in latest climate change offensive’ (Bousso and Schaps 2015), this was an occasion for strong and optimistic statements on behalf of some of the world’s largest GHG emitters (Politiques énergétiques 2015b).

Since then, the CEOs have continued to feature the initiative (e.g. Dudley 2015) and the OGCI published a press release welcoming the Paris Agreement. Although it might seem that the OGCI was primarily developed in anticipation of COP21, interviewees linked to the initiative stated their intention for it to last throughout the transition to a low-carbon future (20–30 years). Indeed, efforts to develop it continue apace, and those involved are optimistic that it will grow.

Much of the OGCI work in 2016 focused on internal coordination between the member companies. The major announcement of the year, however, came ahead of the UNFCCC COP in Marrakech (COP22) and in the form of a commitment from the OGCI members to invest USD 1 billion in low-emissions technologies. The majority of this fund would be used to accelerate the deployment of carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) in gas-fired power plants, while also tackling the issue of methane leakages, which contribute significantly to climate change (Solsvik and Fouche 2016). A spokesperson for the group noted that the initiative would consider increasing their investment upon review (Sampathkumar 2016).

Positions, conditions, styles and strategies

Here, I probe the conditions under which the OGCI and its member oil and gas firms engage in leader-like behaviour, using the climate leaders and pioneers framework proposed by Liefferink and Wurzel (2017). More specifically, I do so by considering four key elements: positions, styles and strategies – derived from this framework – as well as conditions. I introduce this last element due to the difficulty of asserting the good faith of oil and gas actors in taking on leadership roles in relation to climate change and its governance. Indeed, in this context, considering the conditions under which these actors’ positions occur may well be more fruitful than speculating about their underlying motivations.

Positions: internal and external

The first dimension of the framework that Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) put forward concerns the internal (environmental) ambitions of actors. In the OGCI’s case, this means looking closely at the initiative’s members, the 10 firms that have coordinated a common position on climate change.

As the initiative is CEO-led, there is a clear intention to provide internal leadership within the member companies. Members have highlighted this aspect as particularly important and the source of the initiative’s power (Politiques énergétiques 2015b). This high-level involvement is, however, not purely symbolic, as the CEOs are not allowed to delegate their participation and must play an active part in the governance of the initiative, as well as in the choice of the topics pursued.³ In an interview, a key manager from the initiative also noted that the CEO-centric design enables faster project planning and implementation for joint low-carbon efforts.

As detailed by senior managers from three member firms, the OGCI members are also investing resources beyond the leadership of their chief executives. Senior managers, mostly at the Vice-President level, form an executive committee, which is responsible for the day-to-day running of the initiative. Until March 2016, it held weekly teleconferences (now bi-weekly) and they continue to meet once every few months for at least a day. Company experts are also involved through working groups, which convene on a regular basis. This degree of activity clearly indicates internal commitment on the part of the member companies, as these would otherwise not be willing to expend such significant resources in terms of personnel and time.

Moreover, the 2016 decision to invest USD 100 million per firm further cements internal commitments. It could therefore be possible to portray the OGCI member companies as harbouring high internal environmental ambitions in relation to the OGCI, even if it remains too early to say whether these ambitions will crystalize into new and low-carbon practices, technologies and policies.

The second dimension that Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) offer to determine the position of actors is that of external (environmental) ambitions. We can take the governance interactions between the OGCI and other actors within the climate governance regime as a gauge for this. In particular, this means considering links with trade associations, states, international organizations and civil society.

The OGCI has complex ties with oil and gas trade associations: it makes use of guidelines that they have developed, for instance on climate reporting (cf. IPIECA, API and IOGP 2011), and nearly all individual firms are long-standing members.⁴ The CEO of Total explicitly stated that ‘it is better for climate change that we can advocate inside the [API] being a member, being around the table, we don’t change our minds, my position is clear’ (Politiques énergétiques 2015b). The CEO, speaking purely on behalf of Total, also declared: ‘I’m committing the full company – all lobbyists from Total in all organizations have the same position’ (Politiques énergétiques 2015b.). This signals a clear intention to provide external leadership at the level of the oil and gas sector via these trade organizations.

Interactions with states play a prominent role in the OGCI and unfold in two main ways. On the one hand, the initiative includes NOCs, which are part and parcel of states. There is thus a direct link between the OGCI and China, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Norway. While some of these polities have been reluctant to engage in climate governance, the OGCI might offer a less visible arena for them to take on a more active role. On the other hand, the initiative explicitly seeks collaboration with states, for instance, by inviting former French Foreign Minister and chair of the COP21 negotiations Laurent Fabius to its October 2015 event. This desire to engage with states on climate governance indicates some degree of external ambition, yet it has not taken a prominent place in its actions.

When it comes to international organizations, there is a much clearer intention on the part of the OGCI to establish links, including with the UN, the OECD’s IEA and the World Bank. Christiana Figuerres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC was recorded as stating that the ‘OGCI has a very important role to play in as much as OGCI has already accepted that we have to stay under 2C’ (Politiques énergétiques 2015a). However, she went on to caution that ‘we have to figure out how [to stay under 2C], while producing more energy, cheaper energy, cleaner energy, and above all leaving fossil fuels underground’ (Ibid.; italics added). Thus, while the support of these actors seems to be extended in general terms only, there is an explicit attempt to provide some degree of external leadership vis-à-vis these fora.

The most challenging interactions to trace have been those with civil society. Two short video interviews with NGO representatives on the sidelines of the October 2015 event provide some empirical evidence of such interactions. Moreover, one interviewee highlighted that interactions are occurring more frequently than might be otherwise expected, though mostly via informal exchanges (Interview, 2016). Work is also being done with research organizations such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Overall, however, it seems that the OGCI does not have significant external ambitions towards civil society.

Determining the position of the OGCI

Based on this review of the interactions within the OGCI and between it and other actors, including trade organizations, states, international organizations and civil society, it becomes possible to characterize the position of the initiative in terms of the Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) typology. The OGCI has strong internal environmental ambitions, expressed through the willingness of its members to commit resources and senior personnel; externally, it displays similar ambitions towards trade organizations and international organizations, though weaker ones towards states and low ones towards civil society. Table 1 (below) provides an overview of these ambitions and positions, and it highlights that one actor does not necessarily take a single position, which may vary contextually.

Table 1. Overview of ambitions and positions (adapted from Liefferink and Wurzel 2017).

	Internal ambitions	External ambitions
		Trade assoc.	States	IOs	Civil society
High	x	x		x
Neutral			X
Low					x

On the whole, if we are to make use of the Liefferink and Wurzel categories developed, this would imply that we could characterize the OGCI as a pusher, which is defined as an actor ‘which takes the lead domestically and actively seeks to push other[s] to implement its internal ambitions’ (Ibid., p. 4).

Conditions

The nascent involvement of the oil and gas sector in climate governance raises the important question of what conditions lead firms, which have either opposed or remained aloof from efforts to address climate change, to adopt more entrepreneurial positions. The question is, by extension, why are firms whose bread and butter is carbon-intensive suddenly claiming to take part in a global energy transition? Though this shift indeed warrants a healthy dose of scepticism, we cannot shrug it off as yet another instance of greenwashing. In fact, we can trace it to a number of macro-level changes occurring both within and outside of the climate regime.

For one, states are no longer the only governors of climate change; their prominence has declined as others (e.g. international organizations, civil society) have taken up calls for climate action (Pattberg 2016, see also Wurzel et al. 2019, – this volume). Nor have firms been absent from this bottom-up movement. Some have committed to ambitious emissions reduction strategies, and others have banded together in support of climate change mitigation and adaptation (Chan et al. 2015, UNEP 2015, Pattberg and Widerberg 2016).

We can link a second change to the fact that the blanks in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have begun to be filled through the COP process. States are taking on growing levels of commitment, for instance by agreeing to a two-degree Celsius pathway in Paris and going so far as to suggest a 1.5 degrees target. This has effectively created a boundary for societal actors, indicating the point beyond which they could expose themselves to sanctions. A central figure in the OGCI corroborated this view, citing a clearer vision of climate impacts and policies as an underlying motivation for the initiative.

Another development has been increasing support for a low-carbon future, in which energy is primarily generated from renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydro. The mainstreaming of renewable energy technologies as part of what has been called an energy transition makes it impossible to dismiss a low-carbon future as a pipedream: it is today a distinct possibility (Cherp et al. 2011, Verbong and Loorbach 2012, DDPP 2015). Oil and gas firms are following these changes closely and some interviewees from industry were quick to highlight how they themselves are keen to be a part of this transition. As one put it, ‘we think we can play in [the renewable] segment’ (Interview with a senior executive from a European oil and gas firm, 2016)

The scale of this transition has already translated into the overhaul of corporate strategies. In 2016, E.ON, one of Germany’s largest energy firms, finished splitting from its fossil assets (Timperley 2016). That same year, the largest French utility Engie announced that it would aim to derive 90% of its earnings from low-carbon sources within three years (Froley 2016).

At the same time, discursive shifts have been occurring through which climate change is no longer thought of as a far-off threat, but plays a central part in current decision-making. Concepts such as the carbon bubble and stranded assets have pushed some large institutional investors to divest from their holdings in fossil energy (Mathieu 2015). Symbolically, the recent decision by the Rockefeller Foundation – descended of the very same Rockefeller who founded Standard Oil, the ancestor of major oil and gas firms such as Exxon and Chevron – to withdraw its investments from fossil companies made waves (RFF 2016). Nevertheless, industry interviewees questioned the importance of the divestment movement, suggesting that it is ‘fundamentally flawed’.

Styles and strategies

In understanding the strategies through which the OGCI is engaging in climate governance, I have drawn on the Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) categories. Building on Young (2011), the strategies correspond to what they refer to as types of leadership and include the following: structural, which relates to the actor’s material strength and capacity to affect systemic outcomes; entrepreneurial, which involves the negotiation of favourable results; cognitive, which refers to the actor’s efforts to redefine positions through ideas, for instance, via scientific expertise; and exemplary, or leading by example. Analysing strategies through types of leadership has the advantage of highlighting what type of resources the actors mobilize in the pursuit of their goals. In this contribution, I have excluded exemplary leadership, as an example has yet to be set.

As for styles, their analysis permits not only a more detailed assessment of how these companies are approaching climate governance, but also to consider the intensity of their engagement and an indication of what kinds of impacts might be achieved. Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) point to the following styles: humdrum or transactional, relying on step-wise optimization which targets mostly short-term change; heroic or transformational, stemming from far-reaching and long-term ambitions which seek to bring about radical or even revolutionary change. Here, I will refer only to transactional or transformational styles as analytical concepts (see also Wurzel et al. 2019 – this volume).

Types of leadership

Based on the examination of the internal and external interactions of the OGCI, we can argue that it acts as a ‘pusher’, which ‘takes the lead domestically and actively seeks to push [others] to follow its example’ (Liefferink and Wurzel 2017, p. 954–5). Pushers act through two possible assemblages of leadership types (see Table 2 below).

Table 2. Leadership types in different positions (adapted from Liefferink and Wurzel 2017).

Position	Type of leadership
	Structural	Entrepreneurial	Cognitive	Exemplary
Laggard	-	-	-	-
Pioneer	-	-	-	X
Pusher (A)	x	(x)	(x)	(x)
Pusher (B)	(x)	x	X	(x)
Symbolic leader (A)	x	(x)	(x)	(x)
Symbolic leader (B)	(x)	x	X	-

The first option concerns actors capable of mustering structural leadership, and is highly relevant to the OGCI, as its members control vast resources and are responsible for a significant portion of historical GHGE. As an interviewee highlighted, oil and gas firms have a number of advantages in taking an active role in the energy transition: financial resources, know-how, and a significant innovation capacity (Interview, 2017). Nevertheless, in comparison to states or groups of states, we could see these firms as relatively minor players.

The second variety of pusher is less able to draw on structural leadership, but can instead combine its entrepreneurial and cognitive abilities. In this regard, the OGCI is clearly acting entrepreneurially by establishing the first climate governance initiative by and for industry; cognitively, it is putting forward a vision of a low-carbon oil and gas sector, which has the potential to influence future policy.

The OGCI therefore seems to be situated in between these two forms of pushers, as it is possesses qualities of structural leadership and also the abilities linked to entrepreneurial and cognitive elements. Though the OGCI uses the latter two types in all settings, we need to draw a distinction concerning the former (see Table 3). Indeed, within the oil and gas industry, it possesses a higher degree of structural leadership than it does towards states or groups of states. Overall, then, it would seem that the OGCI is strategically able to employ three types of leadership. What this implies, however, is less clear and will require further research.

Table 3. The OGCI and its types of leadership.

Position	Type of leadership
	Structural	Entrepreneurial	Cognitive	Exemplary
Pusher A/B	(x)	X	X	-

Styles of leadership

Determining the styles of leadership as employed by the OGCI remains a fairly speculative affair for the moment since leadership styles – and especially those of a transformational nature – become defined only over time. Indeed, it is not yet possible to say whether the OGCI’s leadership could take on a more radical dimension (i.e. a transformational style). However, as the initiative frames itself within a longer-term energy transition, we can exclude the transactional style that focuses on short-term actions. As such, it would appear that for the moment, the OGCI is making use of a transactional leadership style, which is primarily concerned with optimizing current systems to achieve its goals. Interviews with members of the OGCI so far seem to confirm this, for OGCI members are not trying to implement a far-reaching overhaul of the oil and gas sector, but rather are seeking to adapt it to a low-carbon future.

The OGCI as a potential climate leader

From this exploration of the extent and conditions under which oil and gas companies act as climate leaders or pioneers through four categories – positions, conditions, styles and strategies – the OGCI appears as an ambitious initiative with a significant capacity for leadership. We can categorize it as a pusher in terms of its position, for it exhibits both internal and external ambitions by investing resources and high-level personnel and establishing partnerships with state and non-state actors across the climate regime.

Even though there are few indications as to whether the OGCI will indeed carry through with its stated ambitions, the very fact that it is seeking to influence internal and external actors suggests that it would like to take on a leadership position (rather than merely act as a pioneer, which Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) defined as an actor who does not want to attract followers). Several factors in the context surrounding the OGCI would appear to support this idea: a growing space is opening for non-state actors to become engaged in climate action; increasingly specific targets – such as in the Paris Agreement – that have the potential to constrain actors and generate societal boundaries; and exponential growth in support for a low-carbon future, together with major advances in the required technology.

In considering both positions and conditions, we conclude that the OGCI is a bona fide attempt by the oil and gas industry to become engaged in climate governance, although on its own terms. For the moment, however, it is impossible to predict the outcome of this initiative.

As for the styles and strategies employed by the OGCI to enact leadership, these paint a picture of the initiative as being able to wield influence in a number of ways. Through its considerable resources, the OGCI and its firms can make use of structural leadership, a form usually only available to states. It also employs entrepreneurial and cognitive leadership types by establishing itself as the first collective effort of the oil and gas industry to address climate change, and by putting forward an initial vision of how the oil and gas sector might be integrated into a low-carbon world. However, as the analysis of its leadership styles shows, the OGCI does not have a radical vocation and is primarily designed to push for incremental changes, thereby allowing the industry to adapt to a non-fossil energy future.

Conclusion

This exploration of the positions, conditions, styles and strategies employed by a specific instance of the oil and gas sector, the OGCI, shows it is taking on a leadership role (a ‘pusher’ in the language of Liefferink and Wurzel 2017) in the governance of climate change. Although we are unaccustomed to thinking of oil and gas firms as taking on a more progressive role vis-à-vis climate change, this analysis of the OGCI would seem to indicate that the era of the climate-sceptic fossil fuel regime is at an end and that the industry is now attempting to sketch out a role for itself in a low-carbon world. But this attempt at claiming climate leadership on the part of the industry remains a new turn and, crucially, one that requires a more nuanced understanding of a sector that is increasingly marked by internal divisions in terms of policy, investment decisions and wider strategies.

An important line of questioning in this regard would be how the OGCI and other actors in the oil and gas sector implement leadership. For the moment, actions appear largely discursive (e.g. through statements) and network-based (e.g. by linking to high-level nodes within the climate regime), although more recently, concrete investments for low-carbon technologies have been announced.

Three more questions follow from the answers given to our initial analytical queries concerning the positions, motivations and strategies of the OGCI towards climate governance. First comes the question of why this is important. Although we could dismiss the OGCI as an as yet fruitless initiative, no immediate reasons have been found to discount it altogether. The value of such an early-stage study lies in showing how this initiative and its firms are trying to involve themselves in climate governance, and, in a post-Paris world, to redefine their role vis-à-vis an accelerating energy transition. Given the significant political, financial and regulatory power possessed by these firms, it is essential to track their current attempts to forge state and non-state partnerships throughout the climate regime.

The second question flowing from this is of a more conceptual nature and concerns the limitations of the employed approach, in particular the application of the Liefferink and Wurzel (2017) framework. The main one relates to the difficulty in assessing the position of actors along two purely linear dimensions – their internal and external environmental ambitions – for it is not entirely clear what the criteria or methods should be for attributing such characteristics to actors. The fuzziness of the internal-external divide could then be addressed by putting in place explicit definitions that are equally applicable to state and non-state actors. In the case of the oil and gas industry, ‘internal’ might refer to the sector rather than firm level, whereas ‘external’ might refer to ambitions directed at other sets of actors.

A related issue is the assumption of a single coherent position. Actors may well take on multiple positions simultaneously, as when oil and gas firms make climate commitments and expand oil production in short succession. A final conceptual issue concerns the notion that strategies (i.e. types and styles of leadership) are stable. This contribution has highlighted the co-evolution of external and internal dynamics, which implies that – especially for private actors who have fewer institutional constraints – it is unlikely single or even consistent strategies will be employed. It may therefore be more appropriate to focus on degrees of engagement rather than on given roles such as ‘leader’ and ‘pioneer’.

The third and final question emerging from this discussion relates to its implications for polycentric climate governance. Caution is key here, as there are few guarantees that a nascent initiative will bear fruit and that its ambitions will remain unchanged. We can find a vivid illustration in BP’s ‘Beyond Petroleum’ branding campaign, which BP eventually cast aside in favour of a renewed focus on its core business of oil and gas (Driessen 2003). Yet, there is cause to believe that something beyond a PR change may be occurring. For example, Total recently invested heavily in renewable technologies, for instance, buying a battery maker (Rascouet et al. 2016). Overall, however, the situation remains murky: ExxonMobil orchestrated a major green marketing campaign during the 2016 Rio Olympics, aiming to highlight its environmental ambitions and gloss over its efforts to derail climate science and policy (Henn 2016). Difficult as it may be to tease out the implications, I would nevertheless suggest three – from negative to positive. A rather pessimistic implication from the engagement of oil and gas firms in climate governance would be that a classic case of regulatory capture is at hand (Warren 2016). From a somewhat more neutral perspective, we could argue that multiple pathways are being developed towards a low-carbon world and that competition between them could lead to an upward ratchet in standards and practices (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). On the optimistic edge of this spectrum of implications, it might be said that the engagement of the oil and gas sector in climate governance heralds the injection of vast and sorely needed resources – whether financial, technological or political – into efforts to stem climate change.

If the OGCI is truly to take on a leadership position in relation to the governance of our changing climate, we would do well to closely monitor how it translates its commitments into actions and hold it accountable by denouncing its shortcomings and lauding its successes. It also seems important to delve deeply into the low-carbon visions being put forward by oil and gas firms, which may be unrealistic and reliant on technological fixes rather than on a genuine desire to adapt. Last but certainly not least, we should keep a close eye on the degree of (non-) alignment between state and non-state approaches to climate change: a lesser gap between the two could indicate a greater potential for effective climate action.

Acknowledgments

I have greatly benefited from the comments and patience of the Special Issue editors – Rüdiger Wurzel, Duncan Liefferink, and Diarmuid Torney – both during and after the INOGOV-funded workshop Pioneers and Leaders in Polycentric Climate Governance, which took place in Hull, UK on 15–16 September 2016. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, as well as all interviewees for their trust and time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Such as the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC), a high-level group of CEOs, civil society leaders, and former politicians that advises governments on climate mitigation and adaptation; or the World Business Council for Sustainable Developments (WBCSD) – led Low Carbon Technology Partnerships initiative (LCTPi).

2. National oil companies (NOCs) are state-led and include Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia), CNPC (China), Pemex (Mexico) and Statoil (Norway). By contrast, international oil companies (IOCs), such as BP, Shell and Total, are private-sector corporations. Though all face similar challenges, their agendas and relationship to regulation can differ significantly.

3. One should nonetheless bear in mind that CEOs are not the only decision-makers in these large firms. Decisions tend to taken with the broader executive board, supervisory boards and in some cases also with key investors.

4. In particular, three of the main trade organizations: the American Petroleum Institute (API), Fuels Europe and IPIECA. Each targets specific polities, gathers diverse memberships, and pursues different issues.