An Evolutionary Perspective on Corporate Sustainability Transitions: A Prosocial Approach 1

Companies can actively contribute to large-scale systemic changes towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption by engaging with their own corporate sustainability transitions. This, however, requires new forms of organisational leadership. In this chapter, we make a three-fold contribution to the question of how this might be realised. First, we apply the multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions to the corporate level and conceptualise how the relational orientation towards reference systems plays a key role when working towards sustainability at five different but interrelated levels. Second, we introduce a prosocial leadership approach that builds on and synthesises work from contextual behavioural science, evolutionary science and cooperation science (especially the work by Elinor Ostrom) into a flexible approach for facilitating cooperation across scales. Third, we highlight how such an approach may help to address some of the challenges arising in corporate sustainability transitions and present case vignettes that show how these approaches are reflected in practice.