Abstract
When reflecting on economy, society and environment and being aware of the numerous challenges we face one could get despaired. Climate change, erosion, water scarcity or decreasing biodiversity, among others, are not just posing risks to our natural ambience but also to society – i.e. societal stability and cohesion. As if this were not sufficiently challenging we experience an ongoing uncertain financial and economic situation. Experiencing the impacts of the financial and economic crisis in 2008 and 2009 some thought to see positive aspects in the negative headlines: all these adverse developments seemed to show the necessity for fundamental change in the financial and economic system. So we assume that relevant actors in economy and politics as well as citizens are aware of the need for change and ready for it. But what do we see some years after the emergence of the first wave of crisis? One could call it modest progress: No big steps were taken at Rio + 20 in June 2012 and approaches in dealing with the financial crisis are only still in discussion.
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- 1.
See for example (Seidel and Strebel 1991, 1993) who were at that time strongly involved in the discussion of new topics in environmental economics of firms. The discipline of environmental economics was not just restricted to the level of single firms but to economics in general. See also Weizsäcker et al. very early dealing with innovation for sustainability (Weizsäcker et al. 1996, 2010).
- 2.
Implementation of EMAS (eco-management and audit scheme, the European environmental management system), for instance, was and is still supported by various public bodies.
- 3.
There is empirical evidence for the overlap and mutual reinforcement of social and economic performance. See e.g. the Catalyst Study (Joy et al. 2007) showing a positive relationship between women in top management positions and some economic key performance indicators.
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Grieshuber, E. (2013). Innovation Through Corporate Social Responsibility?. In: Osburg, T., Schmidpeter, R. (eds) Social Innovation. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36540-9_17
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