Corporate Sustainability Culture in Oil and Gas Industry – Enablers and Challenges

Abstract The paper shares learnings from building a corporate sustainability culture as an infrastructure for environmental and sustainability programs by identifying enablers and challenges common to the oil and gas organisations, which are relatively advanced in their sustainability journey. The study presents conclusions from a survey carried out within oil and gas industry and presents learnings in the context of the theoretical exploration of the subject of organisational sustainability culture in recent literature. A closer look at the successes and challenges in developing sustainability and environmental culture within the petroleum industry so far, leads to identification of three main success factors: (1) Strong corporate commitment, visible in practice and genuinely committed leadership; (2) Translating corporate sustainability approach into economic value (such as business development advantage, technological innovation agility, energy savings, cost reduction); (3) Communication of targets and progress towards them and cascading sustainability objectives down to organisational units. The study identifies several prevailing challenges, including: (1) Lack of resources; (2) Lack of leadership or visibility of it and (3) skepticism around either the positive role of oil and gas in climate action or the authenticity of corporate sustainability efforts. When comparing survey respondents’ experience of the organisational sustainability culture to its theoretical models, it can be concluded that (a) sampled organizations’ programs are most developed in the areas suggesting external drivers, such as legislative and customer requirements or public opinion pressure, (b) sustainability vision, corporate values and their communication are seen as the most culture enabling elements of the theoretical model in practice, and (c) challenges in building a sustainability culture are present in all main elements of the theoretical model, likely indicating that the industry is still gaining the experience and developing its approach and solutions for sustainability. Conclusions and implications can be utilized by organisations in early stages of designing sustainability and environmental stewardship programs to consider maximizing the identified success factors while mitigating the challenges to build a sustainability culture that enables organisations to respond to environmental and social demands and build organisational resilience.