At the Crossroads: An Affordance-Based Perspective for Navigating Digital Sustainability Pathways

As organizations face growing pressure to address sustainability challenges and commit to digital transformation, “digital sustainability”—the strategic use of digital technologies to advance sustainable development—has emerged as a promising management paradigm. However, fully realizing this potential requires a vision that integrates sustainability principles from the outset, accounting for both the positive and negative impacts of the affordances of digital technologies on environmental protection and social justice. We develop a framework that conceptualizes digital sustainability as a process of intertwined co-transformation, and detail four possible digital sustainability “pathways”: reducing, removing, drifting, and derailing. We illustrate these with the empirical example of blockchain in the voluntary carbon market, a domain marked by ambiguity over “what technology makes possible,” where techno-enthusiast advocates champion blockchain’s potential, while management practitioners warn of risks and negative outcomes. Our framework contributes to digital sustainability research and practice by unpacking how (un)desirable digital sustainability outcomes emerge from the interaction between the technical and social dimensions of technology—how technological properties are mobilized to address sustainability-related managerial problems. In doing so, it provides a thinking tool to support organizations in anticipating and navigating their own digital sustainability pathways.