Sustainable organizations: the use of the ecosystem services concept in corporate sustainability

Human survival is dependent on a healthy ecosystem, the benefits and services it provides and the natural stocks from which they flow, yet unprecedented rates of decline in biodiversity continue, due to anthropogenic impacts. Ecosystem service approaches offer a different framing of the relationship between organizations and the ecosystem with growing use in corporate environmental sustainability, however there is limited critique of their implementation. I analyze how the concept of ecosystem service (ES) approaches are used in corporate environmental sustainability practice.

My doctoral research is divided into three parts. First is a literature review and conceptual paper on the implementation of ES approaches from a multi-level systems perspective, positioning the research in the multi-level systems literature for corporate environmental sustainability. Second is an in-depth study exploring personal narratives of practitioner experiences using ES approaches in a business setting, where practitioners are corporate sustainability professionals. Third, I critically analyze the corporate reports of 125 cases from 81 organizations who use and publicly report on their ES approaches to understand, through empirical evidence, how organizations are implementing these theoretical approaches.

I find that use of ES approaches in corporate practice enhances practitioner awareness of the environment as a system. Narratives illustrate that practitioners were more aware of temporal and spatial considerations in decision making. Awareness of where and when services are provided from the ecosystem leads to a need to consider a multi-level systems perspective in implementation, to account for the global and temporal attributes of the ecosystem. In examining how ES approaches are implemented, I find no evidence of awareness of the dependency of the organization on ecosystems, nor on the risks and opportunities to the organization from the ecosystem. Finally, the monitoring stages when using ES approaches are weak or poorly reported. For this reason, I advance the conceptual framework for implementation of ES for corporate environmental sustainability by including and highlighting the importance of evaluating and monitoring ES assessments.

The contributions of this research are threefold. First, I provide greater empirical evidence of ecosystem services in use by organizations. Second, I critique both strengths and weaknesses of organizational use of ecosystem services, and finally, I offer an advance in the conceptual framework of corporate use of ecosystem approaches.