Reframing the Architecture of Climate-Related Knowledge: Beyond Disclosure, Toward Strategic Translation

Climate change has generated an unprecedented expansion of disclosure frameworks, metrics, and governance instruments intended to inform corporate strategy. Yet firms continue to differ markedly in how climate-related knowledge is interpreted, prioritized, and embedded in decision-making. This paper addresses this paradox by shifting attention from disclosure practices and firm-level incentives to the upstream architecture of strategy-facing climate-related knowledge. Drawing on a diagnostic bibliometric design, we reconstruct the temporal, cognitive, and functional structure of a corpus of 2181 SSCI-indexed articles spanning accounting, finance, governance, and strategy-oriented climate research. The analyses reveal a knowledge environ- ment characterized by punctuated temporal dynamics, persistent cognitive differentiation across domains, and functional het- erogeneity in evaluative vocabularies. These properties generate pluralism without hierarchy: Multiple legitimate evaluative frames coexist, yet no dominant ordering principle stabilizes strategic interpretation. Under such conditions, climate-related knowledge does not enter organizations as a coherent strategic signal but as a heterogeneous set of partially misaligned inputs that must be translated before they can inform strategic commitments. Building on this diagnosis, we conceptualize climate translation as an orchestration-oriented dynamic capability through which organizations render heterogeneous climate knowl- edge evaluable, comparable, and decision-relevant. This perspective extends strategy and sustainability research by identifying a missing upstream layer linking expanding disclosure infrastructures to uneven strategic engagement. By reframing climate strategy as a problem of evaluability and translation, the paper offers a complementary explanation for persistent variation in corporate responses and highlights why organizational capabilities that structure interpretation and prioritization are central to the strategic use of climate knowledge.