Institutional pressures for corporate biodiversity management practices in the plantation sector: Evidence from the tea industry in Sri Lanka

Plantation companies face growing regulatory and stakeholder pressures to conserve biodiversity in their business operations. However, their responses to these institutional pressures remain largely unexplored, particularly in sectors such as tea. This study aims to identify the institutional factors influencing corporate biodiversity management in Sri Lankan tea plantation companies and how such influences are translated into organizational practices. The data gathered using multiple sources, including interviews, field visits and document analysis, were analysed using institutional theory. The study reveals that regulatory influence and certification standards have significantly shaped biodiversity management practices, leading to structural- and field-level changes within tea plantation companies. The tea companies' conservation initiatives have been institutionalized with homogeneous characteristics at the managerial level. However, in the actual practice, institutional pressures have been translated into many heterogeneous practices at the field-level due to the numerous ways in which ideas disembed, travel and reembed across different organizational levels and are implemented by operational staff in a variety of ways.