From Sensemaking to Action: Developing a Perception-based Framework for Corporate Climate Resilience

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores how large manufacturing companies in the Benelux region make sense of climate resilience and what they perceive as its key elements. Although ‘corporate climate resilience’ has gained increasing attention in academic and practitioner-oriented literature, the concept is characterised by ambiguity and fragmentation, resulting in inconsistent corporate interpretations and practices. Empirical insights into how large businesses perceive and construct meaning around the concept remain nevertheless limited. This research addresses this gap by adopting an inductive, qualitative case-study approach based on 15 semi-structured interviews with 15 representatives from large manufacturers and 4 field experts in the Benelux. Applying thematic analysis, it develops a perception-based framework for corporate climate resilience grounded in organisational sensemaking and perceived resilience elements. The framework suggests that large businesses make sense of climate resilience through a continuous process of interpreting and acting, shaped by firm-level dynamics, systemic interdependencies, and structural constraints. It shows that resilience is shaped through coexisting perspectives and influencing factors, while also being often conditionally relevant. Organisations enact resilience through a continuous interaction between embedment and operationalisation processes. Embedment entails elements of awareness, shared language, pragmatic simplification, willingness, top-down leadership, and strategic embedment, while operationalisation involves data, frameworks, risk-based approaches, ownership, central-local dynamics, and organisational alignment. These elements enable practices of proactive design, redundancy, and resilience across and beyond firms. Overall, the thesis reconceptualises corporate climate resilience as a relational property emerging from interactions between organisational sensemaking and action, and provides practical insights into perceived conditions and challenges for effective climate resilience.