Greenworming Corporate Governance Systems - Alexandra Pimor [LECTURE]

Greenworming Corporate Governance Systems: Nature as Stakeholder and the Art of Mutual Hosting

The language of onboarding Nature into corporate organisations is commonly used; and from an anthropocentric perspective, this suggests that Nature is brought into human-made systems. However, from an eco-logical perspective, this framing is ultimately inverted; for humans are not outside Nature inviting her in; we are, instead, expressions of Nature operating from within her. Corporate organisations, as fictionalised expressions of human imagination, creativity, and collective will, can be deemed themselves emergent natural organisms: assemblages that cannot exist without human presence, and by extension, without Nature herself.

Seen through Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis, recognising Nature as a stakeholder becomes an act of remembering rather than inclusion: an inward opening that acknowledges the ecological reality already constituting organisational life. The metaphor of greenworming captures this internalised process, whereby Nature’s presence composts and regenerates corporate culture from within, gradually transforming corporate governance, incentives, culture, and purpose.

This model enacts symbiotic hospitality, i.e. a mutual hosting in which humans and more-than-human systems or cultures, guest and host one another simultaneously. Etymologically, hospitality derives from hospes, meaning both host and guest, sharing a root with hostis, the stranger. Symbiosis similarly dissolves fixed boundaries between self and other, revealing co-becoming as the basis of life. Indigenous traditions of sacred hospitality echo this understanding, treating relationship itself as the primary ethical field, where welcoming the other is inseparable from honouring the web of life that sustains all participants. In this light, Nature as stakeholder is not an external addition to corporate governance, but an evolutionary recognition of our shared, living entanglement.

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