Matthew Archer, "Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability" (NYU Press, 2024)

Aug 16, 2024

Matthew Archer, an assistant professor at Maastricht University specializing in environmental social sciences, dives into the complexities of corporate sustainability. He critiques the obsession with metrics, arguing that data-driven approaches often obscure deeper issues like social inequality and corporate power. Archer highlights case studies, such as the sustainability standards in the Kenyan tea industry, showcasing how corporate interests can disadvantage small producers. He calls for a holistic perspective on sustainability that prioritizes ethical accountability and genuine environmental action.

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INSIGHT

The Limits of Data-Driven Sustainability

Data-driven sustainability often assumes the existence of objective data, but measurement choices are subjective and political.
This obsession with metrics depoliticizes sustainability and leaves action to the market, avoiding true responsibility.

INSIGHT

Sustainability's Definitional Flexibility

Sustainability is seen as a journey with the three pillars: social, environmental, and economic.
These pillars allow substitutability where good performance in one can offset flaws in another, fueling offsetting schemes.

INSIGHT

Neoliberal Sustainability Explained

Neoliberal sustainability views unsustainability as a market failure solved by better market information.
Quantitative metrics, especially monetary, enable markets to manage social and environmental impacts as economic costs or benefits.

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In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility.

And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability (New York University Press, 2024) contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting. Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you.

The book draws on diverse sources of evidence―ethnographic fieldwork among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction―and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Making the case for the limits of measuring and reporting, Archer seeks to mobilize alternative approaches. Through an intersectional lens incorporating Black and Indigenous theories of knowledge, power and value, he offers a vision of sustainability that aims to be more effective and more socially and ecologically just.

Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor, and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Robin can be reached at rsteiner@fiu.edu.

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