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

Aug 16, 2024

Matthew Archer, an author and critic of corporate sustainability metrics, unveils the hollow nature of corporate transparency. He argues that the obsession with measurable data often depoliticizes genuine sustainability efforts. With insights from his research across the US and Europe, Archer highlights the power dynamics between large corporations and marginalized communities, stressing the need for meaningful social engagement over mere metrics. He encourages a shift towards holistic solutions that address the root causes of climate crises and social inequalities.

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INSIGHT

Defining Sustainability

Sustainability professionals claim that sustainability is impossible to define, yet they give similar definitions.
These definitions revolve around sustainability as a journey, three pillars (social, environmental, economic), and a business case.

INSIGHT

Neoliberal Sustainability

Neoliberal sustainability views unsustainability as a market failure, solvable by improving markets, not dismantling capitalism.
This approach emphasizes providing the market with enough information (data) to efficiently allocate capital.

INSIGHT

Measuring and Reporting Data

Companies often collect and report data that makes them look good, especially if it's something they can improve on or if competitors also perform poorly.
Data collection involves various methods, including purchasing data and voluntary reporting schemes, with increasing regulation.

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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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