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Systems Change Requires Multiple Agents and Dynamics

Systems change requires multiple agents and dynamics

Article by Wayne Visser

Part of the Unlocking Change series for The Guardian.

If Shakespeare was right that “all the world’s a stage”, then consider this cast of characters: Svante Arrhenius, Al Gore, Franny Armstrong, Inez Fung, Mercedes Bustamante and Colin Beavan. Now imagine the stage is set with a few props – the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and the Copenhagen Accord. Finally, weave in some plot twists, such as Hurricane Katrina, Chinese solar subsidies and Fukushima.

We now have all the ingredients for an intriguing play about climate change – or, to be more precise, a story about how whole systems change happens.

Let’s begin with the individuals. Each represents a different type of person that is needed for societal change to be effective. Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish scientist who discovered the greenhouse effect in 1896 and linked it to fossil fuels, is typical of what we might call a genius heretic, someone who changes our paradigm, the way we see the world.

Al Gore, former US vice president and star of An Inconvenient Truth, might be regarded as an iconic leader, someone who uses charisma to communicate ideas and persuade us to change. Franny Armstrong, on the other hand, with her documentaries like McLibel and The Age of Stupid, as well as her 10:10 climate campaign, is more like a freedom fighter.

So here we have three cast members and three different kinds of change agency – paradigmatic, charismatic and activist. Each individual is fairly high profile and offers the possibility of bringing about relatively rapid transformation, using ideas, persuasion and action. So how are next three individuals different?

Ines Fung is a professor of atmospheric science at the University of California, Berkley, who has been working on climate change ever since she won the MIT Rossby Award for outstanding thesis of the year in 1971. She is what we could call a systematic scientist, patiently and persistently studying how things fit together.

Mercedes Bustamante is a director in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Brazil and coordinator lead author of the 5th IPCC Assessment report on mitigation. Her work is all about finding leverage points to change behaviour in society – and especially in agriculture and forestry – so that we can prevent dangerous climate change.

Colin Beavan is neither scientist nor politician. However, he does do experiments. He is most well known for No Impact Man, a documentary account of his attempt to live in New York City for one year with as close to zero environmental impact as possible.

Again, we have three individuals, all advocating different pathways to change – what I call Cartesian, Newtonian and Gandhian strategies. They are typically not high profile people and the process of change is much slower, but they form essential spokes in the wheel of systems change.

Now what of our props and plots? The IPCC also represents a relatively gradual change strategy, but operates at a collective level using the principle of consensus. The EU ETS uses a different mechanism, creating price signals as incentives for behaviour change.

Meanwhile, the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, while disappointing to many, may still turn out to be the tipping point when all the world’s major nations – including developed, emerging and developing countries – finally agreed that deep cuts in global emissions are needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.

These three types of change – consensual, incentivised and pivotal – are slow societal processes that help to build the momentum towards more dramatic change. Our final trio represents revolutionary change, with catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina, combining with rapid growth trends like the way massive Chinese government subsidies have halved solar panel costs since 2010.

We also have butterfly effects, things we could not have predicted, such as Germany’s policy response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, putting it on a fast track to renewable energy. We can call these three types of change cataclysmic, exponential and chaotic.

So, taken together, what does it mean? By recognising the multiple agents and dynamics on the wheel of systems change, we start to see how shifts occur in society. At any one time, there needs to be activity in all four change triptychs – let’s call them invention, intention, evolution and revolution – as is happening with climate change.

We know the story of climate change is far from an end. If it were a three-act play, we’re undoubtedly still in act one. It is one of the issues that has caused the most disruptive change to society in recent decades and – as the recent IPCC 5th Assessment Report confirms – it will probably get worse before it gets better.

The bottom line is that we are gambling with our climate future, but we can still spread our bets. If we want real transformation in society – by choosing a plus two degree rather than a plus six degree world – our best chance is to keep spinning the wheel of systems change.

 

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Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

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Visser, W. (2013) Systems change requires multiple agents and dynamics. The Guardian, 7 October  2013.

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The Sustainability Movement Faces Extinction – What Could Save It?

The sustainability movement faces extinction – what could save it?

Article by Wayne Visser

Part of the Unlocking Change series for The Guardian.

We all want to change the world, but where to begin? A good start would be getting as far away from sustainability as possible. If you are already in its clutches, don’t despair: it’s not too late to turn around, walk away and never look back. Forget you ever heard the s word and take a vow of silence never to speak it again. Once you’ve done that, you might consider joining a tech company (infotech, biotech, cleantech – it doesn’t matter which; they will all be indistinguishable soon). I’m betting that would be a good way to kickstart your world-changing mission.

I say this after 20 years as a professional in sustainability (capital S if you’re a devotee), which I’ve discovered to be many things, but certainly not an effective strategy for change – at least, not yet. The reason is fairly simple: the essential idea of sustainability – that we must endure, perpetuate, hold on to the past and drag it into the future – is about as exciting as watching lettuce wilt under the midday sun. As Michael Braungart, co-author of Cradle to Cradle, likes to say: “sustainability is boring”.

I imagine your expressions of shock and horror, but it’s true. Sustainability has won many battles – for best-new-jargon-inventor, for most-likely-to-make-you-feel-good – but has lost the war for the hearts and minds of the people. It has pinned its colours to the mast of scarcity and survival, when most of the world is far more interested in prosperity and thriving. I’d go so far as to say that the sustainability movement has failed to understand what it means to be human.

Let me explain. As human beings, our lives are all about change – about growth and development. At best, life is about making things better. Even as a civilisation, we’re all about evolution, although we prefer to call it progress. Now, as it happens, sustainability wonks believe that they are all about Progress with a capital P. Unfortunately, the rest of the world remains unconvinced.

Sustainability is like a geeky, pimply teenager who has come to our party, turned off the music and told us that we would really be much happier if we stopped having so much darn fun! The key to having a good time, declares our party-pooper, is to practice a lot more self-restraint. All those on board the austerity train, say “Hell, yeah!” … What, no one?

Make no mistake; if we are to survive (let alone thrive), the world is going to have to change – dramatically, radically and irreversibly. The question is: how will it happen? In this “unlocking change” series for the Guardian, I’ll be digging into the nature of change and what role we play in making it happen – in our societies, our organisations and as individuals. And when change does turn our lives upside-down (as it will), how can we become more resilient?

To begin, let me plant a seminal idea, which is that change is all about connection. In other words, connectivity is the underlying catalyst for change.

We are living proof of this. The first neurons in our brains, called predecessors, are in place 31 days after fertilisation. In the early stages of a foetus’s brain development, 250,000 neurons are added every minute, and, by the time a baby is born, there are about 100bn neurons, which remain roughly constant through life. Learning only happens when synapses are formed: they connect the neurons to each other. At birth, the number of synapses per neuron is about 2,500; by age two or three, it has risen to 15,000 and some neurons later develop up to 50,000 connections each.

Hence, the dramatic changes in the early years of a child’s life – all those remarkable feats of learning and development – are due to increasing connectivity, or, as scientists like to call it, complexity. And we see this same pattern at work in society. The first computer, Charles Babbage’s analytical machine of 1837, would have had the equivalent of 675 bytes of memory. By comparison, according to Cisco, between 1984 and 2012, the internet generated 1.2 zettabytes of data – that’s 1.2 with 20 zeros after it.

The point is that scaling the number of networked relationships is at the heart of almost all change, including biological and social evolution. My contention is that, if we wish to save the sustainability movement from an ironic fate of extinction, we will have to get much smarter about change: better at riding the waves of science and technology, better at becoming intelligently connected, and better at designing change efforts that align with evolutionary dynamics.

 

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Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

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Visser, W. (2013) The sustainability movement faces extinction – what could save it? The Guardian, 30 September 2013.

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Personal Reflections on Responsible Competitiveness

Personal reflections on responsible competitiveness

Article by Wayne Visser

The changing face of global competitiveness

A few years ago, I was invited to make a presentation on CSR in Brussels to the EU High Level Group (HLG), comprising 27 Member State representatives. The topic of my presentation was ‘CSR and the global financial crisis’, and it gave me a fantastic opportunity to talk with some of the people helping to shape the EU agenda. There were a number of trends that I found interesting.

The first was that, whereas formerly CSR was discussed purely as a voluntary activity by business (this was especially clear in the EU’s policy statement on CSR in 2006), there was now increasing discussion and even demand for what Susan Bird, CSR co-ordinator in the Directorate-General for Employment of the European Commission and part of the EU HLG on CSR, called ‘a more active role’, which may involve ‘conditions’ being introduced in the future, although this was all still up for debate.

A second insight was how the competitiveness agenda has changed. The first ten-year economic strategy of the European Union—the Lisbon Agenda, which ended in 2010—was all about competitiveness and paid very little attention to CSR issues. However, the 2008 European Competitiveness Report dedicated an entire chapter to CSR and countries such as Denmark were claiming that responsible, green growth was central to its international reputation and hence its competitiveness. This changing emphasis is also reflected in the new Lisbon Strategy for 2020, which has as its central goal ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’.

Responsible competitiveness

One of the people who has done the most work on responsible competitiveness is Simon Zadek. In 2010, I had the pleasure of visiting him in the lakeside city of Geneva, when he was still CEO of AccountAbility. The purpose of my visit was to interview Zadekabout his book, The Civil Corporation. This formed part of a research project I was conducting for the University of Cambridge, which resulted in the publication of The Top 50 Sustainability Books.

Reflecting back on the book, which was published in 2001, and on what has changed since, Zadek pointed to the geopolitical shift towards Asia and Russia, the increasing influence of investment markets, the re-emergence of a strong state role and greater emphasis on partnerships and collaboration. I asked him what had prompted his more recent focus on responsible competitiveness. Zadek explained that it emerged largely as a response to the views of David Henderson, expressed in his book, Misguided Virtue: False Notions of Corporate Social Responsibility.

Henderson argued that corporate responsibility increased poverty, because it reduced market flexibility and added costs, whereas markets were the route to prosperity. ‘It was a rather caricatured view of everything’, claimed Zadek. ‘But the underlying point made came through to me, which was: what are the macroeconomic effects? We’ve all been concentrating on the micro side.’ Zadek began to realise that: ‘micro-level innovation would be halted if the national policy implications of advancing corporate responsibility at the micro-level would undermine national or regional competitiveness. So to understand the political economy of corporate responsibility or sustainability or citizenship required an understanding where national competitive strategies and the political dimensions of that ‘hit the road’ on this agenda.’

To illustrate what he meant, Zadek noted that: ‘the debate about a post-Kyoto deal is a debate about competitiveness. What’s going to prevent it moving on is a zero sum view without a pay-off matrix; that is, about a loss of competitiveness at both the top of the economic pyramid and mid and low levels in the pyramid.’

I pushed him to elaborate. ‘Climate change is the perfect storm’, he said. ‘It is credible systemic risk accompanied by demonstrable failure of our two primary large-scale instruments of change, namely public policy and capital market allocation. Because public policy is not reshaping markets to be forward looking at anything like the pace that’s needed, and capital markets are not recognising the value-added opportunities, or factoring them into their asset valuation methodologies. And so at that point the importance of collaboration, new models of partnerships, new ways of constructing market rules, becomes the game.’

Lessons from Singapore

I think Singapore can give further insights on responsible competitiveness, especially around the issues of water and human resources. It was only after a political crisis with Malaysia that Singapore instituted the range of measures, including leading-edge filtration and desalination technologies, that now make it not only virtually water self-sufficient, but also a leading exporter of water technologies. I did hear talk of Singapore becoming a green IT or clean-tech hub for Asia, but I think the government’s softly-softly approach will leave it far in the wake of countries such as Korea, Japan and China.

Even so, there is a lesson to be learned from Singapore. As a geographically small city-state, with a relatively high population density, the government quickly faced up to the fact that there is no ‘away’. It had to deal with its own externalities, rather than export them. Innovation was born of necessity. Poverty and pollution could not be tucked away in remote rural regions or ignored as the inevitable lot of a fringe slum society. Either the whole city prospered, or it didn’t. There was nowhere to hide poor governance.

As the Asian tigers jockeyed for position in the region and the world in the 1980s and 1990s, Singapore made strategic investments in two areas—its people (creating a highly skilled labour force) and its infrastructure (making it one of the most friendly trade and investment hubs in the world). Singapore knew that if it didn’t get these two things right, it would have no competitive advantage. Most crucially, it would lose its upwardly mobile workforce to Japan, Korea or the West, and global economic activity would divert to other parts of Asia.

Conclusion

We can all learn from this ‘spaceship earth’ (city-state) thinking of Singapore. But, for me, the jury is still out on responsible competitiveness. Unless the government and companies in India and around the world can shake off the ‘competitiveness at all costs’ mentality, it will always be a responsible business laggard, moving with the late majority; certainly not the worst, but far from the best. Somehow, India needs to answer for itself the ‘why’ question. Why is responsible business relevant, or important in India? I am betting this will inevitably lead straight to another question: how can sustainable business make India more competitive?

 

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Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2013) Personal reflections on responsible competitiveness. CSR & Competitiveness, July 2013.

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Will anyone join your revolution?

Will anyone join your revolution?

Article by Wayne Visser

Margaret Mead once said, ‘The only person who likes change is a wet baby’, to which Hunter Lovins added ‘and the baby squalls all the way through the process.’ So change is never easy, especially on the big issues of sustainability. In thinking about this, I have found Richard Beckhard and David Gleicher’s Formula for Change rather useful: D x V x F > R. This means that three factors must be present for meaningful organisational change to take place. These factors are:

D = Dissatisfaction with how things are now;
V = Vision of what is possible; and
F = First, concrete steps that can be taken towards the vision.

If the product of these three factors is greater than R (Resistance), then change is possible. I have seen sustainability change efforts fail for all four reasons. Deep-seated resistance often exists because the benefits of the status quo to those in power are considerable. Sustainability initiatives, especially if they are integrated into the core business, are often seen as extra burden. For instance, an operations manager of a plant really doesn’t want the extra hassle of collecting emissions data for a sustainability report, or subjecting his staff and facilities to an audit.

Most often, I think, the dissatisfaction that we may feel with the state of the world or the company’s actions really isn’t widely shared enough. Jonathon Porritt, author of Capitalism as if the World Matters, after many years in the sustainability game (he started the UK’s Green Party and chaired the government’s Sustainable Development Commission among other things), told me: ‘Looking at people all over the world today, rich and poor world, they are not remotely close to a state of mind that would call for anything revolutionary. There’s no vast upheaval of people across the world saying, “This system is completely and utterly flawed and must be overturned and we must move towards a different system.”  There isn’t even that, let alone an identification of what the other system would look like.’

Likewise, on creating a compelling vision, Porritt concludes that ‘we have not collectively articulated what this better world looks like – the areas in which it would offer such fantastic improvements in terms of people’s quality of life, the opportunities they would have, a chance to live in totally different ways to the way we live now.  We haven’t done that. Collectively we’ve not made the alternative to this paradigm, this paradigm in progress, work emotionally and physically, in terms of economic excitement.  We’ve just not done it.’ Taking first steps is something companies are generally much better at, especially picking the so-called ‘low hanging fruit’. But the reason these steps so often don’t get beyond the pilot or peripheral stage is because the other two factors – dissatisfaction and vision – are not strong enough.

Another way to think of change in a structured way is Peter Senge’s concept of the learning organisation, popularised in his book, The Fifth Discipline. He described the five interrelated disciplines as follows: ‘Systems thinking [the fifth discipline] needs the disciplines of building shared vision, mental models, and personal mastery to realise its potential.

…

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Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-age-of-responsibility”]Link[/button] The Age of Responsibility (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

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Visser, W. (2013) Will Anyone Join Your Revolution? Eurocharity Yearbook 2012/2013.

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Cycling is sustainable and healthy so why aren’t more of us on our bikes?

Cycling is sustainable and healthy so why aren’t more of us on our bikes?

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

In March 2013, London mayor Boris Johnson – already feted for his pay-as-you-go Boris bikes introduced in 2010 – announced plans for the longest bike route in any European city. This is part of a £1bn bid to double the number of Londoners who cycle over the next decade.

This is certainly welcome news for a city that hopes to reduce its carbon footprint by 60% by 2025. Currently, the average Londoner emits 9.6 tonnes of CO2 per year, which is lower than New York (10.5 tonnes), but almost three times Stockholm (3.6 tonnes), despite Sweden having a far colder climate. Cycling is one obvious way to make a dent on our carbon footprint in the west. But are we convinced?

According to the CTC, the UK national cycling association, a person making the average daily commute of four miles each way would save half a tonne of carbon dioxide per year if they switched from driving to cycling per year. If the UK doubled cycle use by switching from cars, this would reduce Britain’s total greenhouse emissions by 0.6m tonnes, almost as much as switching all London-to-Scotland air travel to rail.

There are obvious health benefits from cycling as well. One classic study found that, while people are killed each year in the UK while cycling (in 2012, 122 cyclists died), many others die prematurely because of lack of exercise. The study estimated that regular cycling provides a net benefit to personal health that outweighs its risk of injury by a factor of 20 to one. If anything, the situation is more extreme today, with estimates that, if things don’t change, 60% of men and 50% of women will be obese by 2050.

The charity, PleaseCycle says the benefits of cycling are demonstrated with some handy statistics. It reports that 79% of employees wish their employers had a more positive outlook on cycling and a 20% increase in cycling by 2015 could save £87m in reduced absenteeism. The charity also claims there is up to 12.5% difference in productivity between exercising and non-exercising employees and regular cycling can reduce a person’s all-cause mortality rate by up to 36%.

Even the economic benefits are compelling. The specialist economic consultancy SQW showed that, an increase in cycling by 20% would release cumulative saving of £500m by 2015. A 50% increase on current cycling rates would unlock more than £1.3bn, by reducing the costs of congestion, pollution and healthcare.

So why aren’t more of us cycling? Surely it’s not that we’re all just lazy? This is where I believe we can learn some lessons from other countries – the Netherlands in particular. The Dutch have turned cycling into a national pastime and the bicycle into a cultural icon: wherever you go in the country, there are swift-flowing rivers of cyclists.

The population of the Netherlands is under 17 million — roughly twice that of New York or London — yet they make more cycle journeys than 313 million Americans, 63 million British and 22 million Australians put together, and they do so with greater safety than cyclists in any of those countries. Londoners only make around 2% of journeys by bike, and New Yorkers even fewer, at only around 0.6% of commutes. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands on an average working day, five million people make an average of 14m cycle journeys.

So why, in an age desperate for more sustainable transport solutions, has the Netherlands succeeded so spectacularly where others have tried and failed?

…

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Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

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Visser, W. (2013) Cycling is sustainable and healthy so why aren’t more of us on our bikes? The Guardian, 20 June 2013.

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The 7 Habits of Effective Sustainability Leaders

The 7 Habits of Effective Sustainability Leaders

Article by Wayne Visser

Without bold and effective leadership – at a political, institutional and individual level – we will fail to resolve our most serious social and environmental crises. This short article summarises some of the findings from my work with the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership[1]. To begin with, we distilled the following simple definition:

“A sustainability leader is someone who inspires and supports action towards a better world.”

There are many characteristics (traits, styles, skills and knowledge) that are associated with sustainability leaders.[2] Our research suggests that the following seven key characteristics are among the most important in distinguishing the leadership approach taken by individuals tackling sustainability issues:

  1. Systemic understanding
  2. Emotional intelligence
  3. Values orientation
  4. Compelling vision
  5. Inclusive style
  6. Innovative approach
  7. Long term perspective

Although it is unlikely that any individual will embody all seven characteristics of sustainability leadership, to give a flavour for each characteristic, they are illustrated below by observations from a selection of leaders, many of whom we have worked with and who demonstrate some of these qualities themselves …

 

[1] See for example, the Cambridge State of Sustainability Leadership publication series since 2011.

[2] See my paper with Polly Courtice for a more comprehensive review of these characteristics

 

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Page[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2013) The 7 Habits of Sustainability Leaders, CSR International Inspiration Series, No. 12.

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Can legal reforms rescue business back from greedy shareholders?

Can legal reforms rescue business back from greedy shareholders?

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

The notion of a social enterprise – a business that explicitly strives to create wider societal benefits, rather than focusing narrowly on shareholder returns – is not new. In the 1700s and 1800s, a charter of incorporation was only bestowed on those businesses that were socially useful – for example, water utilities or railroads.

As Joel Bakan, legal academic and author of The Corporation, explained to me: “The original notion of the corporation was that the sovereign would grant the status of corporation to a group of business people in order to acquit themselves of some responsibility to create something that was in the public good … the notion that this was simply about creating wealth for the owners of the company was alien.”

The 18th and 19th centuries also saw the birth of the co-operative and credit union movements, initially in Britain, France and Germany, and later spreading across the globe. Today, according to the International Co-operative Alliance, more than a billion people are members of co-operatives worldwide, with co-operatives providing 100m jobs (20% more than multinational enterprises).

The economic activity of the largest 300 co-operatives in the world equals that of the 10th largest national economy. In the US alone, there are more than 29,000 co-operatives, accounting for more than $3tn (£1.9tn) in assets, generating more than $500bn in revenue and $25bn in wages.

Despite these noble roots, and the existence of co-operatives as an institutional alternative, the modern corporation with its with short-term, shareholder-driven mission has come to dominate our global economic landscape. Multinationals especially are seen by a growing tide of critics as not only failing to act in the interests of the public good, but as being agents of wholesale value destruction in communities, economies and the environment.

Bakan goes so far as to argue that today’s companies are pathological in nature, in the sense that “the corporation has a legally defined mandate to relentlessly pursue – without exception – its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.”

Partly in reaction to the growing power and impact of big business, we have seen the rise of another counter-movement over the past 40 years, focused on social and environmental entrepreneurs. Among early pioneers were the Ashoka Foundation (established in 1980), Fundes (1985) and the Social Venture Network (1987), with a new wave of momentum coming from high profile cash injections by the Schwabb Foundation (1998) and Skoll Foundation (1999) and books like The Power of Unreasonable People by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan.

Within the big corporates over the same period, corporate social responsibility and sustainable development programmes have gained ground, moving through defensive, charitable, promotional and strategic stages, as I have described elsewhere. However, in the face of growing pressure to prioritise their fiduciary duty towards shareholders, these CSR and ‘triple-bottom line’ efforts have been widely criticised as little more than window-dressing and corporate spin, and largely ineffective in tackling our most pressing social and environmental crises

…

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Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2013) Can legal reforms rescue business back from greedy shareholders? The Guardian, 23 February 2013.

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Where Next for the Circular Economy?

Where Next for the Circular Economy

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

It is not hard to make the case for a circular economy, ie one where closed-loop production brings us closer to the goal of zero waste; according to Hunter Lovins, author and founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions, our global economy is so inefficient that less than 1% of all the resources we extract are actually used in products and are still there six months after sale.

Not only is this unbelievably inefficient, it is also profoundly unsustainable. As Richard Heinberg says in his book, Peak Everything, “The 21st century ushered in an era of declines”, from global oil, natural gas, and coal extraction to yearly grain harvests, climate stability, population, fresh water and minerals like copper and platinum.

The idea of a circular economy is not new. In the 1960s, US economist Kenneth Boulding called for a shift away from “the cowboy economy”, where endless frontiers imply no limits on resource consumption or waste disposal, to “a spaceship economy”, where everything is engineered to be constantly recycled. Mariska van Dalen, a circular economy expert at the consultancy and engineering firm Tebodin, captures the essence of the concept as: “Waste is food, use solar income and celebrate diversity.”

One of the most prominent advocates for the circular economy is Michael Braungart, co-author of Cradle to Cradle (with Bill McDonough). Today, Braungart holds academic chairs in Cradle to Cradle innovation and quality at Rotterdam School of Management and for design at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where Braungart has found his intellectual home.

When I interviewed Braungart for the Top 50 Sustainability Books a few years ago, I found out that he regards the Netherlands as most likely to become the first circular economy. “The Dutch never romanticised nature, so it’s different to the United Kingdom or Germany,” he said. “There’s no ‘mother nature’, because with the next tide they would just swim away. It was always a culture of partnership with nature, learning from nature, and that’s what we need. We can learn endlessly from nature, but it’s not about romanticising nature.”

The Netherlands also have a culture of support, whereas the Americans, Germans, British and Swedish have a culture of control, Braungart said. “They assume human beings are bad anyway and we need to control them to be less bad. But the Dutch culture is a culture of support, because if you don’t support your neighbour, you will drown (because your neighbour couldn’t take care of your dyke). Even if you don’t like your neighbour, you need to support your neighbour. So Cradle to Cradle is a culture of support.”

I was interested to find out whether experts working on the circular economy in the Netherlands also shared Braungart’s confidence. Krispijn Beek, who worked at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Innovation and Agriculture on sustainable business policy, said “Cradle to Cradle was a big hit in the Netherlands, including government.” Apparently, the trend really took off after a 2006 television documentary, Afval = Voedsel (Waste = Food).

However, at a later point the idea stalled – at least in government. Beek claims that “one of the showstoppers was the commercial certification process, which made it impossible to use Cradle to Cradle in public procurement.” …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/article_netherlands_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Where Next for the Circular Economy? (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

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Visser, W. (2012) Where Next for the Circular Economy? The Guardian, 10 December 2012.

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Women and Sustainability

Women and Sustainability:

Taking a Lead in China

Article by Wayne Visser

An International Sustainable Business column for The Guardian

A few years ago, on one of my visits to China, I was invited to speak to a group in Shanghai called Women in Sustainability Action (Wisa). The organisation was set up by a former academic colleague, Jacylyn Shi, as a global network of professional women working in sustainability.

This got me thinking about the relationship between women and sustainability – and especially how this dynamic is playing out in China.

According to professor Kellie McElhaney, founder of the Centre for Responsible Business at University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, companies that empower women are more likely to be companies that act sustainably.

A research paper written by McElhaney and Sanaz Mobasseri found that businesses with more women on their board of directors are more likely to: manage and improve their energy efficiency; measure and reduce their carbon emissions; reduce their packaging impacts; invest in renewable power; improve access to healthcare in developing countries; have strong partnerships with local communities; offer products with nutritional or health benefits; proactively manage human capital development; offer transparent financial products; have anti-corruption policies and programmes; have a high level of disclosure and transparency; and avoid controversies such as accounting fraud, price fixing, criminal behaviour among top executives, controversial customer practices and insider trading.

But why is this? It’s a topic for hot debate and there are probably as many opinions as there are commentators. Do men have inherently unsustainable ways of acting in the world? Does testosterone fuel the exploitation of our planet and its people? Are women our best hope for creating a sustainable future.

Elle Carberry, co-founder and managing director of the China Greentech Initiative believes that women may be drawn to sustainability because of its social angle. “From all my 20 years in business, I have met more women in this area than in others [areas of business],” she says. “Be it in China or the United States.”

She adds: “It does strike me that women come to this with a view about society and business.

In China, women also appear to be playing an increasingly important role in sustainability and for one Chinese woman in particular, this “view about society and business” turned her into the wealthiest self-made woman in the world. Zhang Yin, also known by her Cantonese name Cheung Yan, is the founder and director of Nine Dragons Paper, a recycling company that buys scrap paper from the US, imports it into China, and turns it mainly into cardboard for use in boxes to export Chinese goods.

In 2006, she topped the list of the richest people in China and by 2010 her $4.6bn (£2.9bn) fortune placed her ahead of the likes of Oprah Winfrey and JK Rowling. She has said that she built her entire business empire on some simple advice that she received in Hong Kong in 1985: “Waste paper is like a forest – paper recycles itself, generation after generation.” …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/article_china_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Women and Sustainability (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-quest-for-sustainable-business”]Link[/button] The Quest for Sustainable Business (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2012) Women and Sustainability: Taking a Lead in China, The Guardian, 26 October 2012.

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