Context-Based Sustainability (CBS)
There is a growing consensus, we think, that the time for context-based sustainability (CBS) in corporate sustainability management may have finally come. And none too soon, mind you. After all, the concept has been firmly ensconced in the Global Reporting Initiative’s guidelines for sustainability measurement and reporting for more than a decade now, and is also featured in the draft standard for Integrated Reporting, and the proposed standard for Sustainability Ratings, too. What exactly is CBS, though?
Very simply, CBS is an approach for measuring, managing and reporting sustainability performance that takes the subject literally; that understands, for example, that natural resources are limited, and that the sustainability of their use can only be determined by taking the limitations of their availability explicitly into account at a local, organizational level - not in relative or even absolute terms, that is, but in context-based terms - a third and more authentic way, if you will, of interpreting sustainability performance.
In practice, CBS assesses organizational performance relative to norms, standards or thresholds for what its impacts on vital capital resources would have to be in order to be sustainable. Such norms, standards or thresholds are, in turn, (a) stakeholder-driven, (b) tied to the actual state of social and environmental conditions in the world, (c) expressed in terms of proportionate allocations of available natural capital to specific organizations, and/or (d) expressed in terms of organizational duties or obligations to create and/or maintain other (non-natural) vital capitals (i.e., human capital, social capital, and constructed capital) at levels required to ensure stakeholder well-being.
Once an organization has determined what its norms, standards or thresholds are to have impacts on vital capital resources, metrics can be designed for measuring performance against them, as can strategies and interventions be made for improving sustainability performance where needed. Note here that such norms, standards and thresholds are (a) specific to an organization in light of what it does, where it is, and who its stakeholders are, and (b) can be entirely self-selected. Better to have self-selected standards than no standards at all!
More information about CBS and the metrics involved in its use can be found here. For a broader discussion of the methodology by which CBS can be applied in organizational settings, click here.
For a more formal definition of sustainability context, click here
