The Interplay Between the Government, Market, and Civil Society: A Study of How ESG Concepts Emerge and Evolve in Denmark

Abstract

This thesis seeks to expand the academic knowledge within the domain of ESG, specifically by researching how ESG concepts emerge and evolve from the interplay between the government, market, and civil society in Denmark. By analyzing the ESG doctrine on a national level, this study combines the conceptual framework of Denmark’s negotiated economy developed by Ove Kaj Pedersen with discourse analytics and dispositional analytics, inspired by Michel Foucault. The data material consists of a variety of government foundations, corporate annual reports, articles, websites, calculations, statistics, and more, which contain the self-representation of the Danish government, large-cap corporations, and civil society associations, including how they have communicated their ESG efforts from 2016 to 2023. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first analysis utilizes the concept of the negotiated economy to examine the roles and relationships of the actors in negotiations concerning the ESG policy area. We supplement the first analysis with the concept of discourse to understand the historical development of ESG concepts in a national setting. The second analysis consists of a dispositional analytics, which investigates how the actors use power techniques and calculations derived from three dispositives to influence the definition of ESG domains. We find that ESG concepts emerge and evolve on different levels from the interplay between the government, large-cap corporations, and civil society in Denmark. The first level identified contains the articulation and promotion of ESG concepts, resulting in a variation of agendas and discourses that must be taken into account in the establishment of ESG policies. The second level consists of various organizational types that allows national actors as well as international actors to formulate ESG politics, indicating that ESG in many ways is an international concern. Finally, the third level contains ESG as a domain that is ‘over-determined’ by law, discipline, and security, ultimately resulting in a continuous readjustment or reworking of a diversity of techniques and calculations that surface at various points.