Sustainability – A fading imperative? Proposing a framework of issue maturation into grand challenges

With the institutionalization of sustainability in politics, the economy, and society, it has become so normal for organisations to talk about sustainability that the question is whether the concept has reached its peak in public attention. But if this imperative is fading, what will be next? This article traces the emergence and evolution of sustainability as the grand challenge it has become today. Inspired by complexity theories, it proposes a framework that challenges issue life cycle models from the mass communication era by suggesting that media coverage alone is not a sufficient predictor for an issue’s life. Instead, if organisations want to know which issue will emerge as the next grand challenge, they have to analyse the interactions of topic-, actor-, and system-level factors. The role of organisations’ public relations strategies is considered key for issue maturation. By applying this framework, researchers and practitioners will be able to scan the environment to better understand which could be the grand challenge of tomorrow. The article speculates whether it might be net zero to follow up on sustainability. Six avenues for further empirical research to corroborate this framework for public relations research are discussed, and their implications for practice. This framework of issue maturation into grand challenges is an attempt to update foundational theories of public relations to the digital era by embracing the idea that public communication is inherently constitutive, dynamic, and nonlinear. • Suggests that sustainability is at the peak of public salience and speculates whether net zero might be the label for the grand challenge of tomorrow. • Argues that sustainability is a socially constructed label introduced by strategic actors for discussions about resolutions to anthropogenic climate change. • Posits that organisations influence the course of an issue’s life through their strategic communication. • Proposes a framework for issue maturation in which topic-, actor-, and system-level factors interact to predict which issues emerge as grand challenges.