Ver artículo

The private sector arguably plays a critical role in addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene and providing potential solutions to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Recently, a myriad of new actors in the form of intermediaries, initiatives and organisations have started driving wider systems change by advocating and advising companies to reconsider and broaden their fundamental ‘raison d’être’. In this Perspective we argue that the emergence of this ‘purpose ecosystem’could play an important function within earth system governance, specifically by endorsing and accelerating action aligned with achieving the UN SDGs; yet we also highlight a number of risks, barriers and critical considerations for its overall assessment and propose important questions for further research.© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier BV This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

The private sector has been identified as having critical agency within research on understanding the causes and potential solutions for addressing challenges of the Anthropocene (Albareda and Waddock, 2018; Hoffman and Jennings, 2015, 2018; Wright et al., 2018). In fact, there are growing indications that businesses have started to adopt the language and aspirations of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs)(UN Global Compact and Accenture, 2019; Williams et al., 2019). Yet much like governments, companies' engagement with the Agenda 2030 is entirely voluntary, thus raising questions over how they approach the complexities involved in addressing a multitude of …