A Paradox Perspective on the Sustainability Implementation Gap

The private sector is increasingly expected to contribute to solving major global challenges such as climate change, social inequality and the biodiversity crisis. Recent years have seen companies formulating sustainability strategies that promise to deliver on this expectation. However, while the planet approaches ‘code red’ on multiple critical tipping points, the societal and environmental outcomes of these corporate sustainability (CS) strategies are slow to materialise. The phenomenon under study in this PhD dissertation is the gap between the espoused commitments of companies and the actual corporate contributions to sustainability at the level of natural systems and society, referred to as the sustainability implementation gap. The dissertation explores the complex mechanisms that contribute to this gap through the lens of organisational paradox theory and asks the following research question: How can paradox theory contribute to our understanding and mitigation of the sustainability implementation gap?