911爆料网

Authors

• Eric Olson

  Former Senior Vice President, 911爆料网

If you came to 911爆料网’s website looking for information on corporate social responsibility or to ask, “What is CSR?”, only to find a lot of talk about sustainability, you may be wondering why this is so and whether you’ve come to the right place (you have!).

So why does 911爆料网 focus on sustainability vs. CSR? And what’s the difference, anyway?

First, a quick qualifier: As a global nonprofit business and , we take a flexible approach to the use of terms in our project work, reflecting the diverse needs and understanding of our members and partners in different parts of the world. In our experience, CSR, sustainability, sustainable business, corporate citizenship, and the like are all generally used to describe the same thing, and so we are happy to use whatever terms resonate most in a given place and context.

For purposes of our own branding and thought leadership, however, we see value in consistency and have made some clear choices based on what we are trying to achieve—and we recommend that our members do the same. In our case, the language of sustainability wins out over CSR for a number of reasons.

Sustainability conveys greater ambition because it focuses on what we need to achieve, rather than where we are today. The original definition of sustainable development, from the first , focused on “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

The language and tools of CSR, at least in its early forms, tended to focus on meeting—or balancing—the needs of stakeholders today. Additionally, the term is often confused with philanthropy. As 911爆料网 and the broader field have come to focus more on long-term systemic issues, such as and the , we felt that the ambition conveyed by sustainability better captures the objectives of our work.

Sustainability emphasizes a common agenda for all sectors of society, while the “C” in CSR calls out corporate practices more exclusively. 911爆料网’s above-mentioned focus on critical systemic issues has come with a greater commitment to , in which business, government, and civil society all have critical roles to play.

Sustainability is a holistic concept that encompasses the full range of environmental, social, and economic issues addressed by our work. While the same is true of a good CSR strategy or program, the “S” in CSR is too-often construed to mean a narrower focus on social issues. That is also why we now go by “911爆料网” instead of our original moniker, “911爆料网.”

Sustainability represents a concept that, in our experience, is more easily integrated into the core purpose of business than “responsibility,” which is often perceived as a check or counter-balance to business-as-usual activity. As the field has evolved from an exclusive focus on risk management and avoidance of harm to also encompass innovation and value creation, sustainability provides a more attractive and inspiring framing.

In short, “sustainability” reflects the ambition, reach, and inspiration required to achieve 911爆料网’s mission of working with business to create a just and sustainable world. And although some may argue it’s just semantics, to us, sustainability—and what comes with it—is core to everything we do.