Management and sustainable development in cooperative and social economy enterprises. A literature review on SDGs implementation (2015–2023)

Abstract The United Nations defined the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. As a result, an increasing number of companies have integrated sustainable development practices into their activities with the aim of contributing to the SDGs achievement. Similarly, the SDGs implementation becomes an opportunity for companies, since the creation of social and environmental value simultaneously increases economic and financial value. The contribution of cooperative and social economy firms to the SDGs formulation and implementation is noteworthy within the business sphere. The present study aims to identify the existing gaps in the extant literature on management and SDGs applied to cooperative and social economy firms. To this end, the authors conduct a qualitative analysis of published papers on this topic. To do so, the current work performs a bibliometric analysis using a range of scientific databases (WoS, Scopus) over the time period 2015–2023, together with VOSViewer software. Thus, this study identifies the main methodologies employed in previous studies on this topic and the results obtained. This paper evidences the scarcity of published papers analysing the relationship between cooperative management, social economy firms and sustainability as a core strategy.