Divergent findings regarding an upcoming shareholders’ interest on environmental issues have emerged from management literature. Institutional scholars focus on external pressures to predict shareholders’ preferences, whereas agency studies highlight that such preferences internally face to managers’ priorities. This paper makes a bridge through emerging microfoundations perspective by arguing that different shareholders’ orientation yields different consequences on a firm’s environmental strategy and that internationalisation moderates such relationship. Specifically, our results show that a large presence of strategic shareholders at the firm level positively drives environmental proactivity in a longitudinal sample of 2,247 observations between 2007 and 2017 from 277 US firms in 11 industries. Meanwhile, a large presence of financial shareholders is positively related to a firm’s environmental proactivity only for high levels of a firm’s internationalisation, but negative for low levels of internationalisation. Our results contribute by simultaneously considering micro-level shareholders’ different interests and macro- level institutional pressures.”