Sustainability That Lasts: Leveraging Hierarchical Value Through Integral Sustainability Performance
This conceptual paper examines how organisations can operationalise long-term value creation under ecological constraints. While sustainability frameworks have broadened value creation beyond shareholder interests, they often assume that economic, social, and ecological value can be balanced or optimised simultaneously. From an ecological economics perspective, this is problematic, as economic activity is constrained by ecological systems. Building on ecological economics, the paper develops a hierarchical understanding of value creation in which ecological value constitutes a necessary condition for social and economic value. Accordingly, stakeholder-oriented value creation and sustainability performance are reconceptualised as condition-bound rather than additive processes. The paper introduces Integral Sustainability Performance (ISP) as a conceptual construct that embeds ecological constraints across organisational layers of values, culture, strategy, governance, and business models. ISP links macro-level ecological constraints to organisational processes and provides a basis for operationalizing sustainability performance within ecological limits.