Can’t buy me love: billionaire entrepreneurs’ legitimation strategies in transnational climate governance

ABSTRACT

Several billionaires have recently emerged as leaders of climate governance. So far, little research has examined how they legitimize their involvement in climate networks. We argue that billionaire governance entrepreneurs have high levels of resources but low procedural legitimacy. They pursue output legitimacy to support their political action, highlighting their effectiveness in managing climate issues. Their main strategies, depoliticization, outgrouping, and technical solutionism, may give them short-term legitimacy but risk undermining their long-term goals of addressing climate change. We analyze the discursive legitimation strategies of a successful billionaire entrepreneur in transnational climate governance, Michael Bloomberg. Our empirical analysis is based on the study of more than 800 statements, speeches, and news releases related to Bloomberg’s climate action from 2010 to 2021. It contributes to the study of entrepreneurship, leadership, philanthropy, and transnational actors in climate governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Billionaires
• hyper-agents
• entrepreneurship
• leadership
• legitimacy
• climate governance

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Anne Bach Nielsen for offering insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We collected all the news releases available on C40cities.com and C40.com from January 1^st, 2010, to September 22^nd, 2021. From mikebloomberg.com, which goes beyond environmental content, we focused on environmental releases, using the search terms ‘green’, ‘clean’, ‘climate’, ‘ecolo*’, ‘sustain*’, and ‘environment*.’

2. A Factiva search of ‘C40’ and ‘climate’ and (‘Michael Bloomberg’ OR ‘Mike Bloomberg’ OR “Bloomberg Philanthropies), yielded 644 results, 204 when eliminating duplicates.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture [285503].