Abstract
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly important drivers for businesses’ self-regulation to operate in a sustainable way. We shift the perspective on NGOs from focusing on their advocacy role to focusing on their accountability for having sustainable internal operations. In a multiple case analysis, we explore the question ‘What are the drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct of NGOs that are sustainability advocates?’ Drawing on institutional theory, we obtain novel insights into the legitimacy-seeking motivations for sustainable conduct in the specific context of advocacy NGOs. We found that, affected by its mission, (1) the cultural-cognitive drive is particularly high, with sustainable conduct as an internally ‘taken-for-granted’ behavior, followed by (2) the normative drivers, with the balance between perceived vulnerability of needing to ‘walk the talk’ and the sense of immunity due to lack of external scrutiny, and (3) there are hardly any regulative drivers. Furthermore, these organizations face idiosyncratic trade-offs when balancing investments in their advocacy missions with investments in sustainable operations, reflecting ethical dilemmas. In a broader sense, this research elucidates the way advocates cope in situations of institutional complexity, with conflicting institutional demands between their mission and role-model function.
Highlights
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly important drivers for businesses’ self-regulation to operate in a sustainable way
We focus on a specific type of NGOs that parallels to campaigning organizations (Handy 1990), which we refer to as NGOs acting as sustainability advocates
We focus on international advocacy NGOs that primarily protect the interests of others and lobby for them, acknowledging that advocacy NGOs may have a hybrid role by providing operational services (Teegen et al 2004)
Summary
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly important drivers for businesses’ self-regulation to operate in a sustainable way. In a multiple case analysis, we explore the question ‘What are the drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct of NGOs that are sustainability advocates?’ Drawing on institutional theory, we obtain novel insights into the legitimacy-seeking motivations for sustainable conduct in the specific context of advocacy NGOs. We found that, affected by its mission, (1) the cultural-cognitive drive is high, with sustainable conduct as an internally ‘taken-forgranted’ behavior, followed by (2) the normative drivers, with the balance between perceived vulnerability of needing to ‘walk the talk’ and the sense of immunity due to lack of external scrutiny, and (3) there are hardly any regulative drivers. Contrary to firms that are often questioned about their sustainable conduct, this quote anecdotally demonstrates the public’s assumption that advocacy NGOs ‘walk their talk,’ even though supporting evidence about the NGO’s conduct is lacking This points to an intriguing and somewhat delicate subject of whether and how NGOs acting as sustainability advocates are driven to embed sustainability in their own internal operations. When we shift the focus from NGOs as sustainability advocates to NGOs as responsible players themselves, it appears that information on NGOs’ internal policies and practices is incomplete, or even absent in some cases (Simaens and Koster 2013), and in the literature there is a lack of attention dedicated to NGOs’ internal sustainable practices [apart from initial research on NGOs’ sustainability reporting (Simaens and Koster 2013), accountability and communicative action (Dhanani and Connolly 2015), and limited evidence of sustainable practices by NGOs (e.g., Low and Davenport 2009; Wiser et al 2001)]
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