Published on 10 April 2024
Patrick Oko Quaye – University of Exeter
Gail Whiteman – University of Exeter
Stefano Pascucci – University of Exeter
Ryan Nolan – University of Salford
Many global businesses are struggling with how to identify and assess their impacts and dependencies on nature. In our work with the CBI, the Nature of Business, CBI and the RENEW team within the University of Exeter found that businesses are grappling with the complexity of the issues and a lack of guidance.
Dr Patrick Oko Quaye’s PhD examined how biodiversity and nature loss become meaningful within organisations, how associated responsibilities emerge and evolve, and how organisational contexts enable or constrain their embedding in organisational practices.
The thesis, Ecological Sensemaking in Organisations: Formative Experiences, Managerial Ambivalence, and the Precarious Embedding of Biodiversity and Nature Loss, comprised three empirical studies examining the experiential, managerial and organisational processes through which ecological concerns become noticed, interpreted and translated into organisational action.
The research developed from an interest in how managers make sense of businesses’ biodiversity impacts into a broader examination of ecological sensemaking in organisations: how people encounter, interpret and give meaning to biodiversity and nature loss, and how these meanings shape organisational responsibilities and responses.
This PhD research found:
For business leaders, these insights suggest a practical sequence for moving biodiversity and nature from momentary awareness into enduring organisational responsibility. Leaders can create triggers that make otherwise distant ecological impacts visible, for example through site visits, supplier stories, scenario exercises or nature-risk data; from those impacts in terms relevant to particular functions and strategic choices; and embed responsibility in routine decision processes such as investment appraisal, procurement criteria, risk registers, role descriptions, performance measures and board oversight. They can also support internal sustainability champions by giving them access to decision forums and helping them build coalitions across finance, operations and procurement. Periodic review of these arrangements can reveal whether responsibility remains dependent on a few committed individuals rather than being shared across the organisation.
Patrick completed his PhD in May 2026 and subsequently moved into a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Stockholm School of Economics, where he now researches sustainable supply chains governance in extreme contexts.
His postdoctoral work extends this agenda from the internal organisation to supply chains, where information, authority and accountability are distributed across corporate actors. It provides the next setting in which to examine how sustainability responsibilities are negotiated and translated into governance arrangements and decision processes across organisational boundaries.
This continuing research trajectory will help clarify which governance arrangements enable corporate actors and supply-chain partners to sustain action when ecological and wider sustainability challenges are complex, contested or slow-moving.
Other RENEW activity in this space includes working to integrate biodiversity resilience into impact metrics used by business, and developing a methodology using the Life Cycle Assessment approach to quantify biodiversity impacts.
