Who is reading your white paper?

I am enlightened as an interdisciplinary sustainability/ESIA/ESG professional to find three hundred odd pages of high-quality research emerging every second day from think tanks, regulators, consulting firms and non-profits on various aspects from carbon, biodiversity to blended finance. In the hierarchy instituted by the political economy of knowledge production, these are ‘grey’ literature that would not push the boundaries of our understanding epistemically while these might enable policy understanding at best.

These are certainly not Nature or Science grade or even peer reviewed.

I wonder as a professional who in sustainability leadership has the time, energy, and resources to read and digest these frameworks and deploy them. As sustainability professionals we miss the woods for the trees, and do not think of ESG as a sunk cost to business before the impact starts to flower into ‘green shoots’ of sustainable growth.

While practitioner research or analysis is a plus as far as the master narrative of climate change is concerned, we also need to think who our audience is. Where is the impact?

#sustainability#leadership #climatechange

Thinking Power.

As a practitioner and dare say theorist of resilience, I am interested in how power works through/between/in systems and at all scales. Between the dialectics of class struggle, there are elites within the Davids which navigate power through a Foucauldian and Latourian framing.