Market-led Sustainability is a ‘Fix that Fails’… but It May Have Been the Necessary ‘Defence at First Depth’
By Duncan Austin Humankind is a complex system suddenly pitched into adaptive crisis. From this bigger perspective, our ‘first response’ to the crisis has overwhelmingly been a voluntary market-led response under various banners – SRI, CSR, ESG, ‘impact’ etc. While this voluntary market-led (VML) meta-strategy has been a beneficial, and possibly inevitable, first response, it is becoming clear it is insufficient as an adaptive solution and that its pursuit now forestalls deeper changes required. We need to graduate from a VML...
