The New Sustainability Sandbox

This book explores what it will take for corporate sustainability to move beyond sustainability-as-usual and considers how accelerating cultural, societal, and political shifts are reshaping the path forward.

As businesses confront intensifying environmental and societal pressures, a deeper tension has come into focus: the challenge of driving meaningful change within an economic system still fundamentally optimized for growth and profit maximization. Framed around the challenge of reimagining what transformative sustainability can look like, this collection draws on over a decade of the author’s published work to critique, reimagine, and reconstruct the models, assumptions, and strategies companies use to pursue sustainability. The book is structured into five thematic chapters, each bookended by framing essays that connect and contextualize the selected articles around the chapter’s key themes, with postscripts following selected articles to consider recent updates. These chapters explore topics such as regeneration, degrowth, innovation, systems thinking, and personal agency, all from a strategic design perspective. Overall, the book questions foundational assumptions in the corporate sustainability playbook while proposing bolder, more relevant, and more adaptive approaches that respond to the complex realities of today’s world.

The New Sustainability Sandbox will be a great resource for sustainability professionals, business strategists, designers, and educators working at the intersection of sustainability and business. It will also be of interest to students and researchers of sustainable business, design for sustainability, organizational change, and innovation strategy.