A systematic literature review for developing sustainability assessment tool: formulating the state of the art and future direction

Abstract

Sustainability, with the concept of “triple bottom line”, has been growing as a “trending topic” recently. It is no longer a paradox; it is now about how to turn this challenge or opportunity into day-to-day management decisions to achieve advantage in both financial performance and corporate sustainability. In conjunction with it, there is a growing need for a better way to develop, assess and measure organization’s sustainability performance. This paper discussed a three-stage systematic literature review that is being deployed as the research framework, to scope how sustainability assessments have been developed recently and to formulate the State of the Art for future research. It reviewed 63 selected articles out of 875 papers from Science Direct database. Based on our review, as the novelty proposed by this publication, there were two major approaches used in developing sustainability assessment i.e. criteria-based and model-based approaches. Both approaches had similar popularity in publication: 57% for criteria-based and 43% for model-based. Each had its strengths and weaknesses, but the model-based approach was chosen for future development of the conceptual framework. Furthermore, the review indicated that several main concepts were being used for sustainability assessment and guided the future development into the concept of Business Process Management and Corporate Sustainability.