Abstract
The platform economy is growing exponentially while creating expectations for its potential to contribute to a sustainable development. However, research aimed at showing the potential contribution of each platform’s business model to sustainable development is needed. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are driving the policy agenda, but it remains unclear how far they encourage a sustainable platform economy. First, this article aims to study how each different type of platform contributes to sustainable development. Second, it analyses if and how the factors that contribute to the sustainable design of platforms are considered in SDGs. The paper departs from a framework of sustainable democratic qualities of the platform economy that considers governance, economic sustainability, technological and data policies, social responsibility, and external impact dimensions. The study is based on an empirical analysis of 60 platforms. The results show that a sustainable design of a platform economy promotes sustainable development. Furthermore, the contributions of the sustainable dimensions of a platform to SDGs are mainly connected to the impact and responsibility and the economic model, but governance and data dimensions are not present in the SDGs. This suggests that SDGs should improve their digital perspective to intertwine better with the sustainable platforms.
Highlights
This paper aims to contribute to the debate and state of the art of digitalization of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by providing an analytical framework of how a sustainable design of the platform economy could contribute to the SDGs
The platform economy is growing exponentially while it is creating expectations for its potential to contribute to a sustainable development
This paper has provided an analytical framework of how a sustainable design of the platform economy could contribute to the SDGs
Summary
“SSE has the ability to take the best practices that exist in our present system (such as efficiency, use of technology, and knowledge) and transform them to serve the welfare of the community based on different values and goals” [8] In this sense, platform cooperativism adopts the principles of cooperativism and the values of SSE to promote an alternative to platform capitalism. The empirical analysis of the platform economy (except for paradigmatic cases such as the FLOSS and Wikipedia communities) and public debate are mainly focused on the study of global platforms such as Deliveroo, Uber, and Airbnb [9,10] Another lack in alternative collaborative models studies is that they have focused mostly on providing frameworks for analysis or organizational principles [7,11], but few are the studies that have empirical case analyses, and those performed have mainly focused on highly paradigmatic projects such as Fairbnb [12,13] or SMart [14]. The article does not analyze how each of the organizations presented achieves, or does not achieve, improved working conditions and the other democratic qualities, it only glimpses its potential (ibid)
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