Jonathan Porritt on Sustainability and Business – reflecting on sustainable development
The founder of Forum for the Future offers insights into a decade that saw the Sustainable Development Commission ‘obliterated’ and green business come to the fore.
Sir Jonathan Porritt is founder director and trustee of sustainability non-profit Forum for the Future.
He was later appointed by the Blair government to chair the Sustainable Development Commission for two terms between 2000 and 2009.
Where were you in 2007?
I was chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission at the same time as Forum for the Future was expanding internationally. The Forum had been going for seven years, and we had just got into this incredibly rich period of engagement with the Labour government doing this real joined-up, delivery-based approach to sustainable development across central government departments and local government. It was amazing. And I look at the government scene now and I think ‘oh my God, that was a high point’.
In 2007, for instance, more than 90 per cent of local authorities in the UK had a local Agenda 21 action plan. They had a set of integrated indicators for economic, social and environmental outcomes, which were assessed on an annual basis by the National Audit Office, and regional bodies were really getting their heads around sustainable development.
It was an amazing time, because the government wasn’t standing in the way of business – it was actually saying ‘this is really important’. So everything we were doing in the Forum at that time and everything I was doing through my government role were completely congruent. They were very much marching hand in hand.
I can’t help but compare that with where we are now, because there is nothing happening- literally nothing – from government on this front. It is a complete desert. The Coalition Government got rid of all the sustainable development architecture. It wasn’t just that they got rid of the Commission itself, they also got rid of sustainable development ministers across government, stopped asking local government to do anything, botched all the regional bodies, and even stopped using the phrase ‘sustainable development’ completely because it was held to be irrelevant. In 10 years the entire memory of what sustainable development means as a central guiding principle in government has been obliterated. It’s incredible to see.
What did business sustainability look like 10 years’ ago?
Good. It was good. There were a few companies doing big-picture, joined up sustainable development, although it is also timely to remember how fragile, unfought, and naive some of it was – a lot of it was quite disconnected.
So I think one of the best things over the last 10 years is the degree to which business has upped its game. It has become much more integrated in its thinking, more sophisticated, better able to bring about real change on the ground and through supply chain management, relationships with business partners and consumers and so on. So 10 years’ ago it wasn’t bad, but it looks quite primitive in comparison to where we are now.
What has been the biggest barrier for companies improving their sustainability credentials?
There is a real barrier here. It is clear companies have to be able to demonstrate the ‘business case’ because if they can’t do that, it is quite hard to actually justify to shareholders this is something that is absolutely in their interests.
Now some companies have made a better fist of that than others – Unilever, M&S and others have consistently said it is about long-term value creation rather than short-term business benefit today. But many companies have never really got heads around it and that’s proving now to be quite problematic because the basic ground rules of our capitalist economy have really changed.
No one is suggesting the pursuit of economic growth indefinitely into the future on our finite planet is the closest thing we have to modern, species-wide insanity. You don’t really hear anybody articulate that in modern politics. You do hear more of it – tempered and a little bit nuanced, obviously – in capital markets and amongst some of the savvier investment houses with people thinking about stranded assets and returns over time. But there’s no mainstream challenge to that central premise for what progress for humankind looks like. Even in the most progressive companies, they are still hard up against a fundamentally, structurally unsustainable economy.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned in the past 10 years?
For us in the Forum there has been a really big set of lessons that we’ve had to internalise in the last four or five years. The first is that business is a hugely important and significant player in changing the circumstances out there and in improving the current state of play as it were, and you wouldn’t have said that 10 years’ ago, but now you can say that emphatically, and they are right there as a major agent of change in their own right.
But they have to operate within the ground rules and that means some of the interventions they make are not really as cost effective and outcome-effective as they could be, and there are quite severe limitations on what they can actually do. We have to think much more broadly about the systems in which those companies operate and how they can combine forces with other players to effect change at a systemic level. And that’s not easy – systems engagement doesn’t come naturally to a company that is used to very focused improvements in how it runs its own business and makes the margins it needs to make.
Also, when I think of the role of business in climate issues, particularly at the time of the Paris Summit and the agreement around the Sustainable Development Goals, business was very active in its advocacy work. They were a major influence, succeeding in bringing politicians with them.
So voice is very important, and nowhere is that more important these days than in the USA, where you have now got excruciating dilemmas for many large global companies which are having to work out what to do about a political system and a president that seems to want to reverse much of what they have done over the last 10 years. So that voice issue is crucial.
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