Is sustainability's voluntary era over?

This is article 1 of 4 in The New Age of Sustainability series.

Every instrument of the voluntary sustainability era now sits in the same gloomy quadrant of our latest global survey: low impact, low feasibility. We asked our experts to score 64 ways of driving change on two questions – how much difference would it make, and how realistic is it to pull off?

The voluntary tools score badly on both. The one exception is voluntary corporate reporting, judged more doable, but scoring just 15% on potential impact – the lowest of all 64 interventions we tested. The UN Global Compact scores 16%. B Corp certification scores 22%. The Sustainable Development Goals score 29%. The Paris Agreement: 38%.

Figure 1. Every instrument of the voluntary era is in the same corner – the 64 interventions plotted on impact against feasibility, with the voluntary-era instruments picked out in red in the bottom-left quadrant]

No question, that is grim reading, and it would be easy to mistake it for despair. It is nothing of the kind. Who is doing the grading matters. These are 610 sustainability experts across 57 countries, surveyed in mid-2026 by GlobeScan, the ERM Sustainability Institute and Volans, rating the instruments that many of the experts helped to evolve.

And it is a specific verdict. The chain that has organised this field since 1992 – set global goals, translate them into voluntary corporate commitments, verify through disclosure, let markets and reputation reward the leaders – has been graded link by link, and every link failed. Not the ambition. The mechanism.

A word on the title of the source of these numbers. Gray Rhino Territory: The Sustainability Outlook borrows Michele Wucker's term for a threat that is highly probable, high impact and yet neglected – two tons of rage, charging in plain sight.

Wucker, an American policy analyst, coined it while watching the Eurozone crisis unfold. She defined it against two other animals. A Black Swan, in Nassim Taleb's sense, is rare, unpredictable, and explicable only in hindsight. An elephant in the room is the thing everyone can see and nobody mentions.

Gray Rhinos proliferate in disrupted times, like these. Their oncoming charge becomes more deadly when they come in a herd (collective noun, crash) and politicians and democracies delay, as they increasingly do. Partly as a result of a lack of resources, but also because of a lack of moral imagination and courage. Autocracies and outright tyrannies can move quicker, but risk becoming even deadlier gray rhinos when they allow narrow self-interest to trump any sense of public service.

With a gray rhino, only some of us ignore it, and those who see it have both an advantage and a choice. The weakening of the voluntary chain is the paper's first rhino: in plain sight in the data for several years, and largely unacted on.

The theory of change is itself changing

What is replacing it is visible in the same survey data, and it is not what the sector's own rhetoric would lead you to expect.

The old theory ran: disclose, compare, reallocate. Measure it, publish it, standardise it so performance can be compared, and let capital and reputation flow to the leaders. Its currency was the pledge and the report. It was carried forward by the sustainability profession.

The new theory runs: price it, require it, enforce it, sell it. Changing what governments tax and what they subsidise is the highest-rated intervention in the entire survey, at 77% – stop paying people to do the damaging thing, and charge them for it instead. Carbon pricing, 69%. Trade policy standards, 68%, up five points. Supply chain engagement – the pressure a large buyer can put on the firms it buys from – 69%, up nine points. Courts, 61% and up five. And integration within companies, 70%. The new currency of change is the tax line, the contract clause and the court judgment.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents want the current approach radically revised, up from 56% a year ago. But there is a sting in what they mean by it that the sector has not yet absorbed. The new theory is not more radical than the old one. Instead, it seems to be more coercive.

When we asked what radical revision would actually mean, the top answer was mandatory regulation, enforcement and legal accountability, at 25%. Next came externality pricing, at 15%: making a company pay for damage it currently imposes on everyone else for free. Only 14% proposed moving beyond GDP or growth. Support for wealth redistribution fell to 48%. This is a demand for a repriced economy, not a smaller one.

The strongest objection to all of this came from outside the survey. Professor Ken Pucker of the Fletcher School at Tufts sees little evidence that firms or markets are shifting toward hard sustainability. Indeed, if pressed, he says, he would argue that they are moving "from soft to nearly invisible sustainability."

We print that comment in the Green Paper without answering it, at least directly. Our reading is that the survey measures where practitioners are now placing their bets, not what firms have already done.

My own reading is that Pucker is currently right about where firms have actually got to. So the rest of this series is an argument about what it would take to prove him wrong – and the final piece sets out the five assumptions that would have to hold.

Why the hardening is happening now

Backlash has stopped being a spike and become a condition. Seventy percent report significant resistance in their country – the third straight year at that level, against 57% in 2024. It is deeply uneven: 84% in North America, 43% in Asia-Pacific.

Underneath that sits a deeper structural shift, as I have explored in my Substack column, Rewilding Markets. The post-war order is not so much ending as rewiring – into blocs, supply chains rerouted through allies rather than through whoever is cheapest, and spheres of influence. Reglobalisation, not deglobalisation.

Our survey registers the consequences with unusual clarity. Anything that needs many countries to agree sits at the bottom of every ranking. The tools a single country can operate on its own sit at the top: taxation, trade policy, the rules its central bank sets for banks and insurers, and its courts.

This produces a key paradox likely to sit at the heart of the next decade. Our experts rate trade protectionism among the leading obstacles to progress, at 67% negative. They also rate sustainability standards in trade policy among the leading levers, at 68%. Both are the same instrument seen from different ends.

Meanwhile, trade measures are becoming the principal means of exporting standards – and, more painfully still, the principal means of excluding competitors. Whether any given measure is one or the other will be contested case by case throughout the 2030s.

The opportunity here is real, and it is not one that most boards are prepared for. Sometimes, coalitions of the willing can now move faster than consensus ever did. For years the European Union set rules the rest of the world ended up following, because complying everywhere was cheaper than running two systems – the so-called Brussels Effect. That had less to do with Brussels than with being first to a workable rule. Several blocs can now play that game.

All of which begs the question of what sustainability actually means. In the simplest terms, it means leaving future generations an inheritance, not liabilities. A world they would be thrilled to inherit.

Meanwhile, the question for any corporate leader worth their salt is no longer which pledges to sign. It is which rule-writing tables they absolutely have to be at – and what the trade associations they belong to are saying on their behalf at the tables that remain out of reach.

The second piece in this series asks who inside the company will actually operate these new levers. The short answer: not the people who have carried this agenda so far.

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