Understanding and Overcoming Roadblocks to Sustainability
Understanding and Overcoming Roadblocks to Sustainability
June 14, 2018
Harvard Business School
Over the past several decades, a vibrant scholarly community has generated thousands of empirical and conceptual studies on the complex relationship between business and the natural environment. At the same time, many large corporations have created positions of Corporate Sustainability Officer with the goal of achieving steady improvements in their sustainability performance. Despite substantial academic research and management attention, complex ecological challenges continue to grow. This unfortunate disconnect between aspirations and reality has begun to provoke some self-reflection in the business and natural environment literature concerning its impact and relevance.
A significant body of research on corporate sustainability has examined win-win outcomes, where firms have reduced their environmental and other impacts while reaping economic benefits. Less attention has been devoted to tensions inherent in corporate sustainability, where moving in the direction of sustainability has required managers to change their business models, form risky partnerships, and otherwise incur net costs. Recent empirical business history research appears to show that profits and sustainability have been hard to reconcile throughout history. These tensions and conflicts merit careful examination from a variety of scholarly and practitioner perspectives.
This conference will focus on the roadblocks to sustainability since the 1960s and develop a research agenda for scholars seeking to overcome those roadblocks. In addition to offering a retrospective analysis of where corporate sustainability has fallen short, the conference will explore the incentives, organizational designs, and institutional systems that would allow sustainability to take hold. The organizers aim to assemble business and environmental historians; management scholars; and other academics including philosophers, consumer psychologists, and scientists; as well as practitioners who have tackled these roadblocks head-on.
The conference will address four interrelated roadblocks and four corresponding research questions:
- The roadblock of capital markets and quarterly capitalism. Can public companies ever be sustainable?
- The roadblock of metrics. How can the distorting impact of metrics and indexes be overcome?
- The roadblock of the lack of green consumers. How can consumers be encouraged to be more willing to pay for sustainability?
- The roadblock of public policy. How can governmental inclinations to prioritize things other than sustainability be overcome?