Author: Tiina Onkila, University of Jyväskylä
Within sustainable change research network, we aim to contribute sustainable change with research based activities and to challenge the unsustainable societies of today. For this aim, we need to consider the role of change agents for sustainability. This means involving agency perspective into our discussion, and questions such as how change agents may contribute to sustainable change and why they would be involved.
In our joint project of many Finnish universities, CICAT2025, funded by Academy of Finland, Strategic Research Council, our multidisciplinary research team aims to support the change towards sustainable circular economy in Finnish society and to analyze the catalysts towards the change. As a part of this project, our WP2 focuses on analyzing who are the change agents of circular economy, what are their practices, and how to enforce agency.
To prepare for our empirical research, we reviewed CSR and sustainable business research on agency and its practices. In our review, we identified multiple actors associated with sustainable change in business. These actors are both individuals and organizations and include for example companies (both multinationals and smaller/medium sized companies and family owned companies), individuals in organizations and societies, managers and leaders, consumers, pioneers and champions in different contexts, public sector actors, shareholders, communities and social movements, NGOs and environmental activists, labor unions and stakeholders as a whole.
The research literature is marked by a tendency to analyze the power to influence other groups, and multiple reviewed studies focused on how sustainability actors may aim to promote the change among of other actors. This relates with their either direct power by supporting the change among other stakeholders or indirect power through networking and using language to reshape and frame the phenomenon. Instead, we found hardly any studies analyzing the change within the agents themselves. Some studies described how certain sustainability tools, programs and practices have been adopted and some analyzed how agency may develop among certain groups.
I believe that change agency for sustainability is essentially difficult to understand and analyze. Sustainability is inherently an ambiguous concept. At the micro level the change concerns multiple social, cognitive and emotional processes. Thus change agency for sustainability entails more multifaceted concerns than the reviewed studies would lead us to assume. We should be able to consider questions how sustainability is understood by different actors, how sustainability aims may conflict and include paradoxes and how emotions mark agency. It is often difficult to understand what sustainability means in different contexts. As noted in prior SUCH blogs, sustainability may be given different meanings depending on the context and the definer. Sustainability entails multiple conflicting and paradoxical goals that are difficult to tackle – we are limited in our understanding concerning the direction for our change. Furthermore, sustainability is essentially an emotionally laden phenomenon, with emotions ranging from pride for acting responsibly and anxiety and fear related with changes.
So who can act for sustainable change in our societies? Based on our review, it is difficult to find such an individual or group who could not act for sustainability. A broad range of actors have been identified having possibilities to contribute the change. However, difficulties in understanding the meaning of the term, the direction of change and perhaps the fear of change may hinder many benevolent aims for changes.
Are you a change agent for sustainability yourself? How do you feel about it?
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The author is a senior researcher of Corporate Environmental Management at the University of Jyväskylä, School of Business and Economics and currently involved in CICAT2025-research project.
The blog text is based on a research paper presented at CRR conference 2019 Tampere: Onkila, T., Teerikangas, S., Mäkelä, M. and Koistinen, K. 2019. Sustainability agency: actors attributes and strategies - a systematic review of CSR literature
Please find more information on CICAT2025-project here: https://cicat2025.turkuamk.fi/fi/