Environmental degradation has become an urgent global concern, with emerging and developing economies facing a particularly complex set of challenges. While many of these countries are rapidly industrializing and increasingly integrated into global value chains, they often lack the regulatory infrastructures, institutional capacity, and enforcement mechanisms necessary to ensure environmentally responsible economic activity. These so-called environmental institutional voids amplify the negative externalities of business operations, threatening both ecological integrity and long-term development prospects.
This Special Issue addresses a significant blind spot in international business (IB) research: the intersection between environmental governance and institutional voids in emerging markets. While the concept of institutional voids has received growing attention in IB literature—mainly in relation to market and regulatory failures—its environmental dimensions remain underexplored. In particular, how multinational enterprises (MNEs) navigate weak or absent environmental regulations, and how they may act as institutional entrepreneurs or sources of environmental innovation, warrants deeper scrutiny.
This Special Issue invites scholarly contributions that critically examine the environmental strategies of MNEs operating in institutionally weak contexts. It seeks to understand the mechanisms through which MNEs circumvent, cope with, or compensate for governance deficiencies, and to assess the role they play—intentionally or unintentionally—in shaping environmental outcomes in host countries. Contributors are encouraged to engage with questions of climate justice, sustainability transitions, and the interplay between formal and informal institutions in shaping corporate environmental behavior.
The contributions to this issue aim not only to advance theory, but also to offer actionable insights for practitioners and policymakers seeking to strengthen environmental governance frameworks. Critical perspectives are invited that consider power asymmetries, transnational influence, and the responsibilities of business actors in settings where state regulation is uneven or contested. Comparative, cross-country, and interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome, as are empirical studies that foreground the lived realities of stakeholders most affected by environmental externalities.
The compounding effects of climate change, geopolitical tensions, and shifting global production networks underscore the urgency of understanding how firms operate in institutionally constrained environments—and what they can do to foster sustainable development. By focusing on environmental governance gaps and the corporate strategies that emerge in response, this Special Issue aims to contribute to a more comprehensive, justice-oriented, and context-sensitive understanding of international business in the 21st century.