Organisations Contributions to Sustainability

Organisations have the means, and are instrumental, in making societies more sustainable and advance the Sustainable Development Agenda, e.g. by contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), through their strategies, operations, and providing new solutions. During the last decade there has seen an increasing interest in organisational sustainability, where several ‘organisational sustainability’ definitions have been proposed. The most complete one encompasses the four dimensions of sustainability, the organisation system elements, its stakeholders, change processes and their rate of change, and how inputs are transformed into outputs throughout the supply chain. Two main approaches to explain how organisations contribute to sustainability can be found: (1) efforts to contribute to sustainability, i.e. focussing outside of the organisation; and, (2) engagement efforts, i.e. those focussing inside the organisation, e.g. through the use of tools, initiatives, and approaches for sustainability, and collaboration. Research on organisations’ system elements engagement with sustainability has been limited, nonetheless, it has been found that Research and development and Management tend to be the most engaged, and contribute the most to the four dimensions of sustainability.