A Contemporary Perspective on Corporate Sustainability v. 2

Marjorie Kelly writes in Owning Our Future,

"You don't start with the corporation and ask how to redesign it. You start with life, with human life and the life of the planet, and ask, how do we generate the conditions for life's flourishing?"

The most contemporary approach to achieving these life-giving goals gaining increasing support in our global society is the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. There are 17 of them which over time have been described and further developed. A recent document, Blueprint For Business Leadership On The SDG's, sets out action steps for achieving these goals.

 

The focus of this post is on Goal Number 7: Affordable and Clean Energy. Some of the action steps under this goal refer to the corporate production process or value chain. Others to the resulting products and services. Still others refer to how to implement sustainability practices in the organization. Finally, some action steps focus on the larger society. Examples of actions steps are:

• Commit to steep reductions in energy use through efficiency improvements and use of renewable sources.
• Source energy needs from renewable sources across the supply chain
• Reduce energy use associated with use of our products and services.

The action steps under this goal find echoes in other goals such as Goal Number 12: Responsible Consumption and Production including:

• Throughout the product life cycle, design for minimal resource requirement in use.

These steps are complimented by elements in Goal Number 10: Reduced Inequalities:

• Increase diversity of thought into the workplace, boosting innovation and profitability.

With regard to how to approach the sustainability challenge reflected in these SDG's, the description by Dean Schroeder and Alan Robinson is helpful. This sets out the different levels of possible organization responses to environmental challenges.

1. Compliance with laws and regulations. Following the rules is a cost of doing business.
2. Ad hoc projects that show signs of environmental awareness.
3. Systematic approach to environmental management adopted by the corporation which allows managers to identify and focus efforts on specific areas but which does not impact behavior of front-line employees.
4. Integrating environmental improvement into all of the company's processes and actions along with the traditional emphasis on quality, profit and safety. Environmental performance is part of everyone's work.
5. Developing and testing new approaches for the given industry which experiments with leading-edge technologies and ideas.

One can view this progression of responses as moving from legal compliance or a public relations strategy to an integral integration into the work processes of the organization. According to Susan Mohrman and Abraham Shani, the response to environmental challenges moves from "a series of bolted on one-shot initiatives led by temporary task teams whose work is separate from the business units of the organization" to a change where "social and environmental responsibility must be integrated into the business decision making of organizations."

Another important perspective in this progression is that the response moves from a specific department within the corporation, e.g. the CSR function, to the corporation as a whole to the various providers in the supply chain of the organization and to steps along its distribution channel. The progression moves to the users of the corporation's products and services. The progression then moves to NGO's, government agencies and academic institutions who are potential partners or stakeholders of the corporation in the larger community and to the members of the community, itself. These different aspects of response touch the entire ecosystem of a given corporation. An encompassing corporate response to environmental challenges requires design of the corporation's ecosystem.