Networks Sustainable Development in Global Competition

Abstract

The incoherence of the concept and its theoretical underpinnings have enabled the use of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’ to become de rigueur for politicians and business leaders, sustainability is laden with so many definitions that it risks plunging into meaninglessness. The issue is certainly a global one, and only global organizations are able to work on it and can promote it around the world. For these reasons it is interesting to understand in which way the global corporations, typically organized in global networks, are interested in this issue and what role they can play in the direction of sustainable development. The real actual problem of the sustainable development, indeed, lays first of all in the concept of development and then, but just in a second moment, in the one of sustainability. What is development in a global economy where growth is no more the common rule and we hear the concept of de-growth? Some important answers to this question can be found in the actual discussion about the new role of capitalism in the global economy.