Sustainability is Dead, Long Live Sustainability! Paving the Way to Include ‘The People’ in Sustainability

Abstract

In today’s world, organisations face an ongoing paradox: relying on (near) slave labour in South-East Asia to satisfy clients’ desire for cheap clothing, or producing locally and thus charging a premium price? Sometimes these paradoxes have no ‘better alternative’ (making a choice between the plague or cholera); continuing to rely on fossil fuels such as oil and gas to keep our cars running or relying on children in sub-Saharan Africa to mine the necessary cobalt minerals to create our electric cars? Debate on such topics is present in the sustainability literature. Sustainability refers to a paradigm involving strategic long-term thinking on environmental, social and economic dimensions in order to meet the companies’ current needs ‘without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p. 43). In other words, sustainability is traditionally defined as integrating reasonable economic, environmental and social growth opportunities into business strategies (following the same logic as the famous triple-p bottom line that refers to planet, profit and people and which is widely used in CSR; Gallagher et al., 2018). Once just a passing fad, ‘sustainability’ can now be found everywhere and has