Understanding Sustainability Initiatives

This report presents a typology framework to increase a shared understanding of the complex landscape of sustainability initiatives.

A variety of multistakeholder, government-run, or industry-led initiatives have emerged over the past several decades. This phenomenon responds to different and evolving strategies by businesses, governments, and non-governmental organisations to evaluate and demonstrate the sustainable nature of economic activities along global value chains, as well as to recognise and incentivise good practices against specific standards. Sustainability initiatives are an important element in the governance ecosystem for sustainability, providing potentially effective tools and bottom-up approaches that are geared to specific goals. However, the resulting diversity and heterogeneity among sustainability initiatives can generate confusion and inefficiencies amongst users and prevent effective synergies with policy measures for more sustainable value chains.

The typology framework is designed to address these challenges by providing a structured system of parameters and a common language to increase awareness on how sustainability initiatives can differ. It takes into account the diversity and complexity of these initiatives and facilitates the assessment of their objectives, structure, and key principles. The framework is composed of four chapters: objective, scope, operations, and governance. Each chapter includes the key parameters, or differentiators, that define the main dimensions of the variations found in the sustainability initiatives. For each differentiator, the typology framework identifies a set of associated attributes, allowing to identify different types of sustainability initiatives with descriptive and value-neutral terms.

The common language and framework provided by this typology can be used as a basis for many applications by different users. These applications include capacity building platforms to increase knowledge and uptake of sustainability initiatives, as well as efforts by policy makers to reference and use sustainability initiatives as supporting or implementation tools in regulatory frameworks. However, while users can apply the typology framework to map specific initiatives against the differentiators of interest in empirical applications, the accuracy of any such exercise will depend on the assessment methodology employed and the resulting evidence base. Several best practices are outlined to address some of the challenges and risks with the empirical application of this typology.

Overall, by reducing confusion generated by fragmented and diverse assessments of sustainability initiatives, this typology framework can ultimately promote clarity and harmonisation, fostering a shared understanding of their structure and complexity. This, in turn, can help building more effective and consistent engagement with sustainability initiatives, including from the perspective of public policies looking for synergies and complementarities within a broader governance ecosystem for responsible business conduct.