121. The Business Case for the Sustainable Development Goals: An Empirical Analysis of 21 Danish Companies' Engagement with the SDGs
- Author:
- Michael W. Hansen, Henrik Gundelach, and Erik Johnson
- Publication Date:
- 09-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Business and Development Studies (CBDS), Copenhagen Business School
- Abstract:
- This paper explores why business engage with the SDG agenda, with a view to understanding the business case for the SDGs. Building on and extending the responsibility literature’s discussion of the business case for responsibility, the paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing why business engage with the SDGs. This framework is employed to analyze why a sample of 21 Danish companies decided to engage with the SDG agenda. The analysis finds that most companies view the SDGs as a platform for achieving rather conventional business goals such as mitigating risk, saving costs, and differentiating products and services. However, in a few cases, companies use the SDGs as a lever for carving out uncontested positions in future markets. The paper concludes that companies overwhelmingly view the SDGs as a business opportunity rather than as a business responsibility, something that fundamentally may distinguish the SDG agenda from previous responsibility agendas. The paper fills a gap in the extant literature on business responsibility by developing and validating a classification of the business case for the SDGs based on economic value drivers, and by deepening the empirical understanding of, what precisely this business case may be.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, Sustainable Development Goals, Business, and Social Responsibility
- Political Geography:
- Europe and Denmark