PhD defense Manon Eikelenboom: Achieving sustainability together

This PhD thesis focuses on investigating how incumbent enterprises can assist in achieving societal sustainability. Societal sustainability is an increasingly adopted concept in both literature and practice and addresses how society can reach social, environmental and economic goals. Enterprises are central actors for achieving societal sustainability and can fulfil this role by engaging in corporate sustainability. Another approach enterprises can take to assist in achieving societal sustainability is by adopting circular principles, such as reuse, reduce and remanufacture, which can enable enterprises to close resource loops and keep them closed over time. However, in order to contribute to societal sustainability, enterprises have to make impactful changes and integrate the principles of corporate sustainability and the circular economy in their strategies. This requires new capabilities which are focussed on the generation, preservation and restoration of collective values in collaboration with diverse stakeholders. This PhD thesis therefore investigates how enterprises can interact and collaborate with diverse stakeholders and explores whether this can assist enterprises in integrating the principles of corporate sustainability and the circular economy in their strategies. The findings show that it is essential for enterprises to collaborate and interact with external stakeholders in the network, such as local communities and knowledge institutions, for both the integration of corporate sustainability and the circular economy. Furthermore, this PhD thesis highlights the importance of an early and active involvement of local communities in circular strategies and approaches, where a two-way communication between incumbent businesses, local communities and other stakeholders is crucial.

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