Why sustainability collapsed

This is article 1 of 3 in The Enforcer series.

A field grieving what it built

Alison Taylor spent the past few years talking to sustainability practitioners about what the job has become. In September, drawing on nine anonymous interviews conducted with Stephanie Dolmat, she published the first piece from that work on her Substack [1]. The people she talked to used words like grief, survival, and burnout. One told her she dreams about starting a goat farm instead. Another said she dies quietly on the inside, in private, so she can keep making progress at work.

I read it twice. Not because the grief surprised me. Because the shape of the collapse did.

Nine interviews, one recurring word

Taylor's interviewees describe a profession that, as recently as 2022, sent its leaders to Davos alongside the CEO. Now most just want the job to become boring. "My mission is that sustainability is as boring as accounting," one told her [1]. Nobody in that room is asking for glory anymore. They are asking for the function to survive the next reorganisation.

That is a remarkable request for a discipline that, four years ago, looked embedded in how companies operated. Team leads travelled with CEOs to Davos. The function was expected to speak for stakeholders inside the company, build the business case for finance, work with human resources on culture and incentives, and produce the glossy report at the end. From the outside, it looked like something no company would give up easily.

And it raises a question Taylor's piece doesn't set out to answer. Why did this collapse happen so fast? And why doesn't the same thing happen to every unpopular corporate function?

Two disciplines nobody ever loved

Take financial auditing. In my years as an auditor, I never once met anyone who looked forward to being audited. Nobody rolled out a welcome mat. The process was slow, invasive, and expensive. And companies did it anyway. Year after year, through good economies and bad, through friendly boards and hostile ones.

Take manufacturing certification. I spent years in beer, chemicals, oils, lubricants, institutional cleaning, resins, and metal coatings. The story was the same. Nobody wanted to pay for certification. Nobody wanted to follow the procedures once the auditor left the building. Businesses did the bare minimum and complained the entire way through, and kept doing it anyway, year after year.

Both disciplines have survived decades of open resentment. Sustainability didn't survive four years of a changed political climate. That gap is the real story here, and it isn't really about sustainability. It's about what makes any unpopular discipline durable.

What made the unloved ones stick

Audits stuck because banks required them before they would lend, and shareholders required them before they would trust the numbers. Certifications stuck because customers required them before they would buy. In both cases, somebody with money on the line made compliance a condition of doing business, not a matter of conscience.

Nobody had to believe in the audit for it to hold. The bank didn't care whether the finance team found it meaningful. It cared whether its loan was secure. That's the entire mechanism, and it has nothing to do with persuasion.

There's a second layer to the audit example that's easy to miss, and it matters. The person signing the audit is usually a personally licensed accountant, accountable to a professional body that can pull their licence to practise for falsifying the work. That's not the same enforcer as the bank. It's a separate one, sitting above the first, tied to one person's livelihood rather than the company's balance sheet. Sustainability has never had either version. No outside party requires the work, and no professional body can end a career over doing it badly.

Sustainability ran on conviction instead

Taylor, writing with Robert Eccles in Harvard Business Review a few years back, described the traditional role of the corporate sustainability officer plainly: "Historically CSOs have acted like stealth PR executives, their primary task was to tell an appealing story about corporate sustainability initiatives to the company's many stakeholders" [2]. That isn't an insult. It's an accurate description of a function built to persuade, not a function anyone was ever required to satisfy.

Persuasion works as long as the audience wants to be persuaded. The moment the political climate turned, in the United States first and increasingly elsewhere, a large part of that audience stopped wanting it. No bank, no customer, no shareholder covenant, no licensing body stood behind the belief. Only the belief remained, held by the people who worked in the function and, for a while, by the leaders around them.

The difference is not passion; it's leverage

I don't doubt the passion in Taylor's interviews. I have felt versions of it myself, watching a field I care about lose its footing this quickly. But passion was never what kept audits or certifications alive. Leverage was. Somebody who didn't share the conviction still demanded the behaviour, because their own risk, or their own career, depended on it.

Sustainability never had that somebody. It had a great many people who believed in the work, and very few whose balance sheet, or licence to practise, required it. When belief was fashionable, that was enough to look like progress. When belief went out of fashion, nothing structural remained to hold the work in place.

What this series sets out to answer

That's the question the rest of this series takes on. If sustainability is going to hold the way auditing and certification have held, for decades, through leadership changes and unfriendly politics, it needs something closer to what those two disciplines have. An enforcer with its own money, or its own name, at stake, not just practitioners with their own conscience at stake.

Part two looks at who could plausibly fill that role now: regulation, insurance, lending, voluntary standards, courts and permits, and anchor customers. And then audits each one against a single test. Does it actually change what a company would otherwise choose to do, or does it just look like it does? Part three asks what a leader does in the meantime, since nobody is coming to hand anyone that enforcer, and most companies will never be the one dominant buyer in their market.

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