Proposed research agenda to improve corporate sustainability management
An important research priority for the study of corporate sustainability is development of modelling and decision-making approaches and tools that support dynamic, adaptive management rather than a static optimisation. There is a need to determine the points of intervention in the social ecological systems in which business operates where resilience can be increased to the desired configurations to future changes. This requires methods for understanding the full implications of alternative choices and their relative attractiveness in terms of enhancing systems resilience. Thereby, extend sustainability science into the field of business management (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The extension of the sustainability science field to business management
Practical implications to enhance corporate sustainability management
The critical principles upon which to base these new approaches to dealing with extreme scarcity and fundamental uncertainty within business include the following:
- Acknowledge and adopt a systems approach to the management of a business by recognising the relationships and interactions between the social and ecological systems relevant to the business.
- Diversification of business practices and processes to expose and enable the business to exploit positive outcomes associated with uncertainty and to minimise exposure the impacts of negative consequences of uncertainty.
- Minimising negative impacts of business operations on the system and maximising positive impacts (avoid the temptations of adopting cheap green-washing activities that actually do not reduce the damage being done to the environment and that don’t improve the resilience of the business to unpredictable negative impacts of declining environmental and social conditions).
- Adopt a longer-term perspective (5 to 10 years) on planning and management, so as to avoid the temptation for short-term gains. Sustainability intrinsically demands long-term planning, because the required change is hard to accomplish within a short-time frame due to the complexity of social-ecological systems.
- Educate and convince shareholders of the above four points so as to get support for these initiatives. This is important because it is likely that the implementation of new approaches and procedures that fulfil the above 4 requirements will likely incur upfront net economic costs and longer-term future benefits.
While little progress has yet to be made in developing ‘data-drive’ and practically implementable approaches and tools to enable business to make strategic decisions about systems resilience and adaptation, there is hope in that some businesses are being proactive and funding research proposals in which the social-economic system of their business operations are mapped and resilience intervention points determined for long term sustainability policies and strategies.