Prioritization of Internal and External Corporate Sustainability Dimensions: Evidence from Sustainability Auditors Using AHP

Abstract

Corporate sustainability has traditionally been evaluated through environmental, social, and economic dimensions. However, increasing sustainability challenges, stakeholder expectations, and regulatory requirements indicate that sustainability extends beyond conventional performance measures and requires an integrated perspective that considers both internal organizational capabilities and external institutional conditions. This study develops an integrated internal–external sustainability framework and prioritizes sustainability dimensions from the perspective of licensed sustainability auditors in Türkiye. The proposed framework comprises governance, ethical, behavioral, cultural, environmental, social, economic, legal, and technological dimensions. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to pairwise comparison data collected from 15 licensed sustainability auditors to determine the relative importance of these dimensions. The results indicate that external sustainability dimensions received substantially higher priority (70.97%) than internal dimensions (29.03%), demonstrating that sustainability assessments are primarily shaped by environmental challenges, regulatory requirements, stakeholder expectations, technological developments, and market conditions. Among the nine corporate sustainability dimensions, environmental sustainability received the highest overall priority, followed by technological, ethical, social, economic, legal, governance, cultural, and behavioral dimensions. These findings suggest that although internal organizational capabilities remain important, corporate sustainability is predominantly influenced by external institutional and environmental factors. By proposing an integrated internal–external sustainability framework, this study extends conventional sustainability assessment approaches and contributes to the sustainability governance and assurance literature. The findings also provide practical implications for sustainability reporting, assurance, governance, and strategic decision-making by identifying the sustainability dimensions that deserve the greatest managerial and regulatory attention.