The Business Case for Sustainability: An Empirical Analysis of 21 Companies' Engagement With the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

ABSTRACT This article explores why businesses engage with the United Nations SDG agenda, with a view to understanding how managers construct the business case for the SDGs. Building on and extending the responsibility literature's discussion of the business case for responsibility, the article develops a conceptual framework for analyzing why businesses engage with the SDGs based on the notion of economic value drivers. This framework is employed to analyze why a sample of 21 companies decided to engage with the SDG agenda. The article finds that companies view the SDGs as a business development agenda rather than as a business responsibility agenda, something that fundamentally may distinguish the SDG agenda from previous responsibility agendas. Most companies see the SDGs as a vehicle to develop more conventional business cases, such as mitigating risk, improving efficiency, or differentiating products and services. However, some companies see the SDGs as a lever for carving out uncontested positions in future markets, that is, as a vehicle for market sensing and market creation. The paper finds that companies do not typically identify a single SDG business case but identify several business cases that are dynamically evolving. Finally, the paper offers insights into how business cases are accompanied by organizational and business model change. Overall, the paper fills a gap in the extant literature on business responsibility by developing, empirically validating, and deepening an economic value‐based classification of business cases for the SDGs.