The current pandemic has exposed blatant social injustices and inequalities around the world, prompting businesses to face their societal impact. Before the crisis, however, a rising wave of employee activism had already started to call into question the extent to which companies had managed to meet their moral obligations. Employees at Wayfair, Microsoft, Google, Twitter […]
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Lobbying and the virus – three trends to take note of
Writing about anything in relation to Covid-19 is rather hopeless. Any attempt to describe current developments has a half-time of 30 minutes. Any attempt to speculate what lies ahead drowns in the flood of near infinite plausible trajectories. And any and every attempt usually ends up with the hammer and nail problem, resulting in the […]
How to make food systems more resilient: Try Behavioural Food Policies
The vision of healthy and sustainable food systems that facilitate appropriate food choices by individuals is gaining momentum in practice and in the marketplace. As the single strongest lever to optimize both human health and environmental sustainability, the food choices we make matter in multiple ways – for our bodies, the environment, and the economic and […]
The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Consequentiality of Metaphors
Language is a reef of dead metaphors – Guy Deutscher We are in the midst of an unfolding crisis that humanity is struggling to understand. To make sense of the unknown, humans tend to rely on metaphors, analogies, or other rhetorical figures. What do metaphors do? They allow for giving meaning to a (rather unknown) […]
The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions About Sustainability
In the midst of the global coronavirus crisis, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Japanese government finally decided last month to postpone the Tokyo 2020 Olympics until next year. The general public across the world may have different views on the Olympics – positive and negative, or simply indifference. But with regard to the Tokyo […]
Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic
What is the responsibility of Western retailers to the workers who make their garments as the coronavirus forces factories to shut down? Shopping malls are closed, gatherings are banned, thousands of employees have been furloughed, and movement outside of one’s home is discouraged if not outright illegal. This has meant bad news for apparel brands […]
Sustainable Development, Interrupted?
The coronavirus and responses to the pandemic are right now defining human existence inside and outside of organizations. All societal attention and communication are centred on the virus, its day-to-day consequences and possible future repercussions for the people, the economy – and the planet. Indeed, we are living through a gargantuan social experiment, and these […]
Normalizing Sustainability
We often hear the argument that, given the urgency of climate change and sustainability concerns, significant changes to individual behaviours and lifestyles are required. This has led to a wide array of public education and climate literacy campaigns aimed at changing such behaviours. In this blog, I will argue that some fairly strong research findings […]
Sustainable Consumer Behavior: Go Big or Go Home?
In recent years, news on issues such as climate change, environmental degradation and plastic pollution was almost inescapable. At least in Europe, newspapers reported on environmental topics regularly, political discussions often revolved around greenhouse gas emissions or environmental policy, and sustainability content creators gained large numbers of followers on social media with tips on package-free […]
Just Announced: And the World’s Worst Company is …. Really?
Why naming a hardly known German company as the world’s most controversial company inadvertently makes a lot of sense.