Sustainability Strategy

The planet and our society are on unsustainable footing. Many firms do more harm than good in helping to bring about environmental, social, and economic sustainability. This chapter offers guidance on how firms can make the urgently needed strategic shift to sustainability. The chapter begins by defining sustainability strategy and reviewing the literature on this topic. Much of the current literature views sustainability strategy as a plan to sustain and increase firm performance, subject to constraints imposed by the natural environment. However, to help bring about sustainability, firms must treat their environments not as something to be strategically buffered from, but as parts of a vulnerable system that they have an active and critical role in sustaining. We outline four sustainability strategies—calculative, cooperative, concerned, and co-creative—and suggest future research directions to aid firms in shifting from firm-centric solutions toward strategies that sustain the vulnerable social-ecological system.