Guiding the Research Agenda on Digital Sustainability: A Metareview of Inhibitors, Drivers and Impacts

The use of digital technologies to advance sustainability, also called digital sustainability, holds great potential. Over the last few years, research and practice have gained increasing interest in the topic. Nevertheless, implementing digital sustainability is a complicated process that requires significant changes and poses high costs. Therefore, there is a need to understand what drives the implementation and the impacts of digital sustainability. The current literature on digital sustainability is vast and spread across several different outlets. This paper provides a metareview of 39 reviews, editorials, and conceptual papers. It focuses on implementation projects and identifies how organizations can implement digital sustainability. It also identifies the potential impacts of digital sustainability that organizations can utilize. The included research papers are categorized by type and frequency, research focus, and theoretical goals. The analysis synthesizes the current literature and presents the framework of digital sustainability that summarizes the key enablers and inhibitors, a list of technologies documented to advance sustainability, and the first- and second-order impacts of digital sustainability. The paper concludes by identifying the main research gaps and research directions to be addressed by future studies.