Introduction

Sustainability — shorthand for sustainable development (SD) — is one of today’s new buzzwords. It is now a well-established part of the vernacular in many countries across the globe, but especially in the advanced industrial democracies. For many, the widespread penetration of sustainability into both language and culture signifies environmentalism’s success in making its case about a planet in peril. But contemporary sustainability has an additionally important meaning — signalling the centrality of business, particularly the corporate sector, to the environmental agenda today. Importantly, business was no longer to be viewed simply as the problem; it would now become a key part of the solution. While business’ embrace of a corporate responsibility ethos is critical to the sustainability enterprise, and was acknowledged as such by many, not all welcomed the sustainability route it would go on to champion. For some sustainability, and now corporate sustainability, highlights the easy fluidity of a term that can be made to mean very much or very little. Others look with increasing alarm at what they consider business’ co-optation, and subsequent dilution, of the environmental agenda. But what both sides agree on is that the conversation about environmental issues, their situation within politics and society, and the position that contemporary business adopts in relation to them, have undergone considerable transformation over a relatively short period.