Prior research has documented involvement of government and civil society actors in governance processes, but has largely neglected a key player: corporate business interests. Combining insights from social-ecological systems, organizational systems theory, theories of governance and power, interest group rule-making participation, and non-state alternative environmental governance, we examine corporate involvement and power in environmental governance systems. Drawing on a sample of Twitter messages about fuel economy standards, posted between 2012 and 2020, we offer a sector-level discourse analysis of corporate power and its interaction with the sociopolitical environment. The results suggest that business interests are gaining increasing power in the participation arena of U.S. fuel economy governance processes. The results likewise indicate corporations’ response to a changing political landscape in the U.S. Taken together, our analysis advances current scholarship on power dynamics in governance processes and on empirical assessment of power, offering implications for governance system design and implementation.

先前的研究记录了政府和民间社会参与者参与治理过程，但在很大程度上忽略了一个关键参与者：企业商业利益。结合社会生态系统、组织系统理论、治理与权力理论、利益集团规则制定参与和非国家替代环境治理的见解，我们考察了环境治理系统中的企业参与和权力。我们利用 2012 年至 2020 年间发布的有关燃油经济性标准的 Twitter 消息样本，对企业权力及其与社会政治环境的相互作用进行了部门层面的话语分析。结果表明，商业利益在美国燃油经济性治理过程的参与领域中获得越来越大的权力。