Building a Social Case for Business Sustainability

The business case for sustainability is interpreted within the sustainability literature to mean the pursuit of sustainability should increase an organisation's financial performance. The inherent weakness in this approach is the singular focus on economic performance to evaluate sustainability projects which necessarily contain environmental, social and economic components. This paper reviews the literature pertaining to the business case for sustainability prior to developing a broader social case framework which shows the potential for stakeholder well-being to be affected by numerous social impacts caused by business activities across a broad range of impact categories. Application of the social case framework is demonstrated using the case of Coca-Cola in Kerala, India leading to the conclusion that the effectiveness of implementing sustainability in business is increased by combining the business and social case frameworks to assess potential impacts prior to sustainability implementation.