Make Sustainability Great Again
Sustainability has lost its mojo, and the blame doesn’t lie only with those working against it. Those trying to advance it also need to rethink their approach, challenge conventional assumptions, and find new ways to make sustainability relevant, appealing, and yes, great again.
Jerry Seinfeld has a stand-up bit about how ‘sucks’ and ‘great’ are really close. It’s a very funny bit and I also find it to be an accurate observation, not surprising coming from Seinfeld. Watching this bit, my thoughts started wandering to sustainability, which not too long ago I felt was pretty great — it was never easy to work on, but nevertheless offered new and promising horizons. And now? My sense is that, for the most part, sustainability sucks.
Let’s face it. Right now, sustainability is on (almost) no one’s agenda. Oh, yes, I know COP31 takes place next month and it’s certainly on its agenda, but, frankly, these climate conferences have long lost their mojo and have very little impact. If anything they only highlight how sustainability has moved to the periphery. This may be surprising given the growing impacts of climate change worldwide, but nevertheless this is where we are:
CEOs don’t truly consider sustainability in their business decisions.
Voters don’t prioritize sustainability at the ballot box.
Consumers don’t pay much attention to sustainability when shopping.
Policymakers don’t meaningfully factor sustainability into their policy agendas.
I know these are generalizations, and you can certainly find exceptions, but these are the rule rather than the exception, or even more so, the current zeitgeist, where sustainability has morphed into a non-issue, or at least one that barely influences the decisions we make.
So, who is to blame for our failure to ensure sustainability guides our lives in a more meaningful way? Or has sustainability itself lost its ability to play an important role in the lives of people, businesses, and regulators? And perhaps most importantly, how do we make sustainability great again?
Let’s start with sustainability itself
“Sustainability is both a badly misused and abused term,” John Ehrenfeld and Andrew Hoffman wrote in “Flourishing: A Frank Conversation About Sustainability” more than a decade ago. Today, it may be as true as ever, if not more so.
First, ask people what sustainability means and the vast majority won’t be able to give you a clear answer. Greenwashing, greenhindering, and the ongoing watering down of sustainability in business and policy have certainly contributed to this confusion and vagueness. The situation is not much different when it comes to circularity or regeneration, two variants that were supposed to provide more up-to-date, easier-to-digest, and even cooler versions of sustainability, but have proven to suffer from the same symptoms.
So, what are we talking about when we talk about sustainability? As much as I like Ehrenfeld’s definition of “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever,” I also want to be honest about where we stand today. So, here’s my “inventory” of what sustainability entails and what it doesn’t:
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What it is (as I see it):
- A promise of a better world
- Challenging taken-for-granted assumptions
- Too much reporting, too little innovation
- Entails potentially challenging trade-offs
- A big tent for many issues
- An invitation to creativity and innovation
What it isn’t (as I see it):
- Inspiring / exciting / fun
- Culturally embedded
- Well-designed
- Sufficiently connected to people’s actual priorities
- Focused on the near term
- Offering clear added value
Nothing is perfect, but as you can see, sustainability possesses key flaws that need to be addressed, not only because they make it suck, but also because they make it easier to portray sustainability as a barrier to progress rather than its driver. We can see how these flaws are exploited in attacks on net-zero policies, ESG strategies, and environmental regulations, which are all, at the end of the day, expressions of sustainability.
Who Is responsible for this?
So, who’s responsible for the fact that sustainability sucks? The list of actors who directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, have led sustainability to where it is today is long, but, in general, they can be divided into two buckets. The first is the usual suspects, i.e. politicians, business leaders, and other powerful actors who exercise what Alex Steffen calls predatory delay: “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” These are precisely the people who would like to keep sustainability sucking because their interests are aligned with the exact opposite of what sustainability stands for.
The second bucket is very different. It includes good people with good intentions who have been working tirelessly to advance sustainability. The key issue is that many of them have approached sustainability in a rather traditional, and perhaps naive, way. The focus has been too much on technical solutions, measurement, reporting, and top-down regulation, and too little on understanding the political, cultural, and personal forces that are key to driving change. As Karen O’Brien and Linda Sygna pointed out back in 2013, sustainability transformations require engaging with three interconnected spheres: practical, political, and personal. I believe we have failed to engage effectively with each of these spheres, let alone integrate them into a coherent framework for driving change.
The result of powerful actors engaging in predatory delay on the one hand and advocates approaching sustainability with yesterday’s mindset rather than tomorrow’s on the other is exactly what we see today. The efforts of many good people are still being undermined by attacks and sabotage, and even when we see victories, they are slow to come, incremental, often temporary, and insufficient to meet the urgency of this moment in human history.
This doesn’t mean that I underestimate how far sustainability has come and how different it is today in its reach and adoption compared to, let’s say, 50 years ago. However, this goes back to the point that BSR made in 2012 — “As we reflect on the past 20 years, it seems that everything has changed, and nothing has changed.” As I point out in my first book (Rethinking Corporate Sustainability in the Era of Climate Crisis: A Strategic Design Approach), this notion is even more true now. The point is that sustainability sucks not because we haven’t achieved anything, but because we haven’t achieved enough. Enough of what? Enough, for example, to keep us within safer ecological boundaries, not to mention fairer ones.
Make sustainability great again
So, now, the key question is: how do we make sustainability great again? I believe we need to fundamentally rethink how we approach it. Call it a reboot, going back to the whiteboard, a pivot, or whatever you like. It doesn’t matter. The point is that sustainability needs to be revamped, no matter how you look at it. Yes, I know this may sound radical or even nonsensical, but if we continue in the current direction, or just tweak it here and there, sustainability will continue to suck. Greatness may be close but getting there will require a big change.
I would start by embracing design as a catalyst for change, placing a greater focus on people’s actual needs, priorities, and aspirations, and developing solutions that are truly desirable, affordable, and exciting, with clear short-term benefits, not just long-term ones. We also need to adopt a strategic rewilding approach that looks for inspiration in unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable places, breaks free from the conventional sustainability playbook, and embraces a hacker mindset rather than traditional recipes for changemaking. Finally, we need to better connect personal action with systemic change, recognizing that the two can and should reinforce each other rather than being considered as separate matters.
And this is just the beginning. In my forthcoming book (January 2027), The New Sustainability Sandbox: Breaking Free from Business as Usual, I explore these questions and offer more ways to take on this challenge and approach sustainability differently. Remember: Sustainability doesn’t have to suck. We can make it great again.
Raz Godelnik is an Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design — The New School. He is the author of Rethinking Corporate Sustainability in the Era of Climate Crisis and the forthcoming The New Sustainability Sandbox: Breaking Free from Business as Usual (January 2027). You can follow him on LinkedIn.
