Birthplace & Historical Archive of Multicapitalism & Context-Based Accounting

About CSO

The Center for Sustainable Organizations (CSO) was originally a 501(c)(3) non-profit created in 2004 by its founder and Executive Director, Mark W. McElroy, PhD. Its purpose was to conduct research, development, training and consulting for, and with, companies around the world interested in improving the sustainability of their operations. Effective January 1, 2024, CSO no longer exists as an organization per se, and now takes the form of an online archive of its work (this website) to be privately maintained by Dr. McElroy.

What differentiated CSO from others in the field (and still does) was its strong commitment to an approach for corporate sustainability management that is “context-based” (i.e., that interprets sustainability performance in terms of impacts on vital capitals relative to organization-specific norms for what they would have to be in order to be sustainable).  Indeed, Context-Based Sustainability (CBS) was created by Dr. McElroy at CSO and comprised its core theory of change. This website will continue to serve as a portal or archive from which 20-years’ worth of CBS-related materials can be freely obtained.

CSO’s founder and Executive Director (retired), Mark W. McElroy, PhD, is also board chair emeritus of the Donella Meadows Institute, now part of the Academy for Systems Change, and formerly led the Center for Sustainability Performance at Deloitte Consulting in Boston. Prior to that, he was a partner at KPMG and spent several years beforehand as a consultant at PwC. Dr. McElroy is also affiliated with the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, where his development of CBS and the Social Footprint Method took the form of his doctoral dissertation there in 2005-2008.