Abstract
The rapid pace and escalating severity of climate change impacts have made clear that current incremental approaches to pressing global socio-ecological challenges are insufficient to address the root causes of unsustainable development. This has spurred increasing interest in the dynamics of transformation: the actors, capacities and resources needed to fundamentally shift development paths. The private sector is at the core of essential transformative processes necessary to build a future premised on environmental integrity, social inclusivity, and resilience. The activities of the private sector are structured and driven by their underlying business model, which is at its core a set of assumptions about how a business creates, extracts and delivers value. Dominant conceptualizations of the business model remain a narrow imagining of how business interacts with societal processes and shape development patterns. In this article we call for the conceptualization and design of business models anchored in societal purpose and operating within planetary boundaries, apt for the Anthropocene. We identify five building blocks for business models where transdisciplinary sustainability research can accelerate entrepreneurial activity that fosters desirable sustainable pathways by enabling the creation of new capabilities in support of broader transformational processes. This article seeks to inform (and potentially re-orient the efforts of) transdisciplinary scholars engaging the private sector in the co-production of community-based sustainability and resilience-building initiatives. Likewise, the building blocks provide a guide for businesses who aim to deepen their capacity to build new partnerships, identify, and incorporate new information on climate risk into their operations and develop practices, sequences and procedures oriented toward the sustainable development goals and disaster resilience.
Highlights
The anthropogenic cause and dramatic but unequally distributed impacts of global climate change have been both observable and well-studied over the last two decades (IPCC 2007; Stocker et al 2013; King et al 2015)
Our objective is to develop a conceptual framework that reveals the ways a business model might expand to build the new capabilities required to respond to the challenges presented by the Anthropocene
A preliminary database matrix containing information on sustainable enterprises and an array of practices was prepared, which helped to validate the set of building blocks that respond to the gaps identified in business model conceptualizations, but which are critical to address the key sustainability and resilience challenges
Summary
The anthropogenic cause and dramatic but unequally distributed impacts of global climate change have been both observable and well-studied over the last two decades (IPCC 2007; Stocker et al 2013; King et al 2015). These global dynamics, create deeply local challenges: placebased socio-ecological dynamics fraught with unparalleled challenges for governments, organizations and individuals that will require a rapid transformation toward more. A profound shift in the configuration of growth-oriented models (Nightingale et al 2020) can begin to address the root cause of risk: the unsustainability of current economic patterns, and an extractive relationship to nature. New processes and capacities must emerge that feed a fundamentally altered relationship between humans and the environment, driven by visions and stories of what a desirable future might look like (Bennett et al 2016; Pereira et al 2018a, b)
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