Photo: IUCN
With limited time and resources, the change that you target needs to be both ambitious and realistic in order to be effective. There is no point aiming for a company to invest in landscape restoration if they are not even meeting legal requirements, for instance.
The shift to a sustainable company does not happen all at once. Therefore, which level of change to aim for depends greatly on two main factors:
- The enabling environment
- The maturity of the company on sustainability
The enabling environment
The enabling environment refers to the local and national laws and government policies that are already in place, the level of awareness in the private sector around corporate responsibility, etc. Ecolex, a freely available information service on environmental law, can be searched to identify what laws apply to which specific sectors in your country.
Other external factors include access to financing and associated conditions, the market and consumer expectations and level of civil society empowerment.... all of which are linked to a company’s reputation.
Company maturity on sustainability
While some companies are designed around sustainability principles, most are not. Companies transform typically through four levels:
|
Level of business practices |
Typical behaviours |
|
1. Compliance |
Meet minimum legal requirements, some limited philanthropic activities |
|
2. Efficiency |
Implements good practices to address human and nature impacts |
|
3. Strategic |
Policies in place to systematically addressing human and nature issues, some products are sustainable |
|
4. Sustaining |
Fully aligned human, social and natural capital values, and circular economy approaches have an overall positive impact on nature and people. |
*Adapted from Dunphy, Griffiths and Benn (2003, updated 2017).
Typically, the change you want to see can be grouped into two main groups:
- Meeting minimum safeguards to reduce negative impacts (levels 1-2)
- Going beyond good practice to have an overall positive contribution to nature and people (levels 3-4).
Another business framework the conservation community can learn from is the innovation adoption curve, which shows how the take up of a given change happens in distinct stages – from first movers to early adopters. Crucially, the development and adoption of legal frameworks and voluntary compliance with the new policy help create the shift in early and late movers, while enforcing the regulation helps move the ‘laggards.’
Understanding barriers and enablers for change
Change happens at different levels, including at the individual, project and organisational level. It can be accelerated within a company by external drivers, such as by government and financial policies as well as by consumer demand. This has been the case in the rise against single-use plastic.
Typically, the barriers to successful change at each level are sequential, according to the ADKAR model, a leading corporate change framework:
- Awareness for the change
- Desire to make the change
- Knowledge on how to make the change
- Ability or resources to be able to make the change
- Reinforcement of the change to stop
At each level, it’s important to understand and have validated the current barriers to the change in behaviour you want to see, and then target your approach accordingly.
For example, in Burkina Faso, where mining companies were not following the new mining code, CSOs found out this was due to lack of awareness and also support from the government, and then worked directly with the Chamber of Mines to increase the uptake of the practices laid out in the code and support payment into a restoration fund (equivalent to level 1: Compliance in the table).
Once you understand the change you want to make and the barriers, you can then design a tailored approach.
Useful Resources
Slides and speaking notes - Unblocking change processes: Introduction to the change framework ADKAR, including exercise on slide 8
