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Creating abundance
Published in William Sarni, David Grant, Water Stewardship and Business Value, 2018
Another way to look at the value of water in the public sector is based upon the work of the Social Progress Imperative (SPI) ( which, as the name implies, looks beyond gross domestic product (GDP) to quantify the environmental and social performance of countries. According to SPI: a society which fails to address basic human needs, equip citizens to improve their quality of life, protect the environment, and provide opportunity for its citizens is not succeeding. We must widen our understanding of the success of societies beyond economic outcomes. Inclusive growth requires achieving both economic and social progress. The Social Progress Index aims to meet this pressing need through a robust and holistic measurement framework for social and environmental performance that can be used by leaders in government, business, and civil society to benchmark success and accelerate progress. The Social Progress Index is the first comprehensive framework for measuring social progress that is independent of GDP, but complementary to it. Our vision is a world in which social progress sits alongside GDP as a core benchmark for national performance. The Index provides a systematic, empirical foundation to guide strategy for inclusive growth. It was first implemented at the national level in 2014, and has been enhanced each year and expanded to regions, cities, and individual communities. Measuring social progress guides us in translating economic gains into better social and environmental performance in ways that will unleash even greater economic success. The Social Progress Index provides a concrete framework for understanding and then prioritizing an action agenda advancing both social and economic performance.
Corporate social sustainability in supply chains: a thematic analysis of the literature
Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2018
ManMohan S. Sodhi, Christopher S. Tang
Despite that, sustainability research, especially in this sector, tends to focus on what is reported by the companies themselves rather than on the supposed beneficiaries. For instance, Jenkins and Yakovleva (2006) analyse the disclosures of the 10 largest mining companies worldwide and propose a way to distinguish ‘leaders’ from ‘laggards’ in such disclosure. Another leaders-versus-laggards study analyses every conflict minerals report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission by over 1300 corporations finds that widespread outsourcing may have reduced the corporate sector’s capacity to account for its internal operations (Kim and Davis 2016). To help implement socially sustainable sourcing, Gould, Missimer, and Mesquita (2017) present a prototype model to help product developers help link their product concepts to social sustainability of the countries where materials for these products would have to be extracted. They propose using established social sustainability indicators – pertaining to impartiality, health, influence and competence – and country-based databases (Social Hotspots; Social Progress Index) to score each source country, and note limitations.