Seeds in Concrete: How Women Leaders Drive Organizational Change in the Climate Transition

Abstract

The low-carbon transition confronts organizations with a double challenge: developing the technological solutions required to reduce emissions and building the organizational capabilities needed to generate, circulate, and apply the knowledge that makes those solutions viable. Leadership plays a central role in both dimensions, yet how gendered leadership dynamics shape knowledge processes within climate initiatives remains poorly understood. The study integrates perspectives from leadership, change management, and knowledge management to theorize how organizations navigate the complexities of environmental change. Drawing on deductive content analysis to examine interview transcripts and biographical profiles of twelve senior women managers across policy, finance, business, and activism featured in Reuters Events’ Trailblazing Women in Climate 2026, the study investigates how women leaders operating across climate and sustainability ecosystems interpret and navigate the structural constraints they encounter, and how their leadership practices influence organizational processes to drive change in the climate transition. The analysis highlights that women leaders simultaneously diagnose and navigate a layered set of structural barriers while enacting leadership practices that are both individually distinctive and collectively oriented. At the individual level, their leadership is characterized by long-term thinking, adaptability, and a persistent disposition toward action even under institutional uncertainty. At the collective level, they function as connectors, coalition-builders, and disseminators, translating innovative practices across organizational and sectoral boundaries. The evidence indicates that excluding women from leadership does not merely reproduce injustice: it actively degrades the quality of organizational knowledge processes, misprices climate risk, and constrains systemic resilience across organizations facing fragmented governance and volatile institutional environments. The study contributes to research on organizational learning and sustainability transitions by analyzing how gender interacts with knowledge dynamics in contexts characterized by institutional complexity and urgency. For practitioners, it identifies organizational conditions that either enable or suppress the leadership contributions most needed to drive knowledge-intensive climate action.