SUSTAINABLE

“Business does not stand outside society, just as human society does not stand outside nature.”

Lester W. Milbrath

a new
approach

Our understanding of sustainability highlights systemic limits and the dependency of society and economy on nature, and it thus provides a logical value ordering to these domains.

We conceive the business sphere as a subsystem, fully encompassed within society, and thus it cannot be fully or even partially separated from society.

Our systemic view makes salient the need to take nature’s resource limitations and human impacts that act to degrade natural resource capacity much more seriously, even if our primary concern is to maintain business system integrity.

From our perspective, the relative value of the Business, Social and Nature sphere can be ordered according to the logic of existential dependency. By existential dependency, we simply mean that one system is dependent on another for its survival. This can also be considered a logic of sustainability, where sustainability is defined as the “capacity for continuance into the long-term future”

the "NSB" framework

Nature

Society

Business

“The twenty-first century will, in fact, be the Age of Nature.

We’ll learn, probably the hard way, that nature matters: we’re not separate from it, we’re dependent on it, and when there’s trouble in nature, there’s trouble in society.”

Homer-Dixon, 2006

NSB & Finance

Finance is about decision-making, especially about the allocation of financial resources, regardless of its purpose, whether corporate, personal or philanthropic.

In order to take a decision, we need to understand first what we want to achieve and secondly how we can achieve it.

Financial analysts reduce uncertainty in the decision-making process by evaluating different options and assessing risks.

The NSB (Nature, Society, Business) framework can help us better understand how we can achieve our goals while prioritising factors during the evaluation phase and consequently also structure the decision-making process as a whole.