Fehre, KerstinVerweire, Kurt2025-03-052025-03-052025https://repository.vlerick.com/handle/20.500.12127/7653Sustainability has become an important topic on the strategic agenda of most firms. Business is facing great demands from all sorts of stakeholders today due to the world’s enormous societal challenges: climate change and its consequences (like water scarcity), social inequality and injustice, poverty, depletion of natural resources, to name just a few. And people are expecting businesses to play a bigger role in addressing these societal problems. Firms have responded by setting up numerous sustainability initiatives – often captured under the label of ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance). But for many firms, the journey towards becoming more sustainable is a tough one. Despite good intentions, the implementation of corporate sustainability programmes has been slow at best, and sloppy and ineffective at worst. We believe that a major reason firms struggle to transform towards sustainability is that these sustainability programmes are insufficiently embedded in the company’s core strategy. In this paper, we analyse why this is a problem and what managers can do about it. More specifically, we propose a new approach to managing your sustainability initiatives, one that is more grounded in strategy.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Belgiumhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/be/SustainabilityStrategy24214435930