The Elephant in the Sustainability Room: Addressing the Tension between Growth and Environmental Goals in Corporate Business Strategies

This paper from BSR can help you understand the tension between economic growth and sustainability. It starts at the macro level, explaining our ecological crisis and its link to the current economic system. It then highlights the need to explore alternative economic systems that are centred on sufficiency and wellbeing rather than growth, and examines how businesses' focus on growth undermines their sustainability targets. Finally, it considers how this tension can be reconciled, emphasising the need for business model innovation, and outlines promising alternatives, such as sufficiency-based, regenerative, circular, and social enterprise models. These insights will be most useful to sustainability practitioners and business leaders - especially those who recognise the need for business transformation but are struggling to align their business activities with long-term sustainability commitments and the planetary boundaries.