(Image above from Schulte, J. 2021. Strategic Sustainability Risk Management in Product Development Companies, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Doctoral Dissertation Series No. 2021:09.)
Based on systems thinking, the FSSD is a science-based, structured approach to working systematically and strategically with the complex sustainability challenge society faces. It is designed to facilitate analysis, planning, decision-making and strategic collaborative action across disciplines and sectors towards sustainability at any scale, in any context.
At its core, the FSSD has basic principles that define social and ecological sustainability, and guidelines for how to strategically support society’s fulfilment of those principles. It is a non-prescriptive framework supporting any person or organization to create a vision of their own sustainable future within their specific context. It stimulates ideas for what steps might be taken to move towards that vision and supports prioritisation of these possible steps into an economically viable change plan. The FSSD also guides selection, development and a coordinated use of supplementary concepts, methods and tools for sustainable development.
The FSSD opens up the possibility for creative solutions uniquely suited to any context and has the power to bring together the seemingly incompatible (e.g. ethics with profitability, short-term with long-term, the small organization with the whole world, and stakeholders with apparently divergent interests).
The FSSD has been developed over the past 25 years through an ongoing, comprehensive, peer-reviewed scientific process, including application and testing in the field. Over the course of its history, the FSSD has successfully contributed to advancing the sustainability work in hundreds of organisations around the world, including through the advisory work of The Natural Step. Examples include businesses such as IKEA , Interface, Starbucks, Nike, Scandic Hotels, Hydro Polymers and Rohm and Hass, as well as municipalities such as Whistler BC in Canada, Madison, Wisconsin in the United States, and many more around the world. In Sweden, a network of more than ninety “eco-municipalities” has signed on to implement the FSSD in their operations.
Usage
The FSSD is based on the concept of backcasting from basic socio-ecological sustainability principles (backcasting means looking back from an imagined point in the future in order to explore strategies to get there). The Sustainability Principles represent the root-causes of unsustainability, and can be used as boundary conditions for a vision to do backcasting from, enabling strategic sustainable development. As the principles can be applied on any scale, they can guide the sustainable re-design of society, organisations, products, components, etc.
These principles are: “In a sustainable society, Nature is not subject to systematically increasing (1) …concentrations of substances from the Earth’s crust, (2) …concentrations of substances produced by society, (3) …degradation by physical means, and, in that society people are not subject to structural obstacles to (4) health, (5) influence, (6) competence, (7) impartiality, and, (8) meaning-making” (Broman & Robèrt, 2017).
Strategic Prioritization Questions
During the operationalization of the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development, organisations must find a way to prioritise the actions that come from their initial brainstorms (usually during the D step of the ABCD approach). This can be done using these three strategic prioritisation questions:
Is this action moving you toward or away from sustainability vision?
Is this action a flexible platform toward your sustainability vision?
Will this action offer an adequate return on investment*?
*Note that ROI (return on investment) is traditionally seen as a return on financial investment, but it can also mean a return on political, social or other types of investment.
5 Level Framework
The 5-level framework is a model for planning in complex systems. It allows us to be deliberate and thoughtful in our journey toward sustainability. We will use a game analogy throughout these levels to help clarify the differences in scope and content.
1. System Level
Identification of the scope of the system we’re dealing with. In the case of a game, the system would be the playing field and all of it’s components. In terms of sustainability, the system is the entire biosphere. So we need an understanding of the way our system works. This can be found on our science page.
The Funnel – a core concept at this level is the idea that we are currently operating in a “funnel”. The funnel is a metaphor that helps us visualise the economic, social and environmental pressures that are growing on society as natural resources and ecosystem services diminish and the population’s number and consumption grows.
2. Success Level
In this case the success level is “sustainability.” Success in the game is winning, usually measured by the team that scored the most points. In the field of sustainable development, sustainability means that nature is not subject to systematic increases in:
- concentrations of substances from the Earth’s crust;
- concentrations of substances produced by society;
- degradation by physical means;
- and, in that society,
people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.
For more on the 4 system conditions / sustainability principles.
3. Strategic Level
These are some strategic guidelines for organizations to follow in implementing the framework and taking actions towards sustainability. Following our game example, this level would be the strategizing level as the team members come together to plan a goal.
The most important strategy to focus on is backcasting from principles: it consists of establishing a vision of the organization in the future where the four sustainability principles are not being violated and then ‘backcasting’ to the present to see what specific actions should be taken first to start strategically working towards that vision.
4. Action Level
These are the concrete actions that are taken on the path to sustainability. Depending on the nature of the organization, they could include things like phasing out fossil fuel use by switching some capacity to renewable energy, or substituting metals that are naturally abundant in the biosphere and therefore benign for ones that are scarce and potentially harmful. In our game analogy, actions would be moving towards the net to score a goal, passing to team-mates, etc.
5. Tools Level
Here we find a variety of tools that help organizations manage their path towards sustainability. Certain tools are effective in different situations, but a lot of them work well together and create synergies when utilized within the context of the framework. They include Environmental Management Systems, ISO 14001, Life Cycle Assessment, Factor 10, Natural Capitalism, Ecological Footprinting, Zero Emission, etc. A lot of these tools have great organizations behind them and are helping organizations with various environmental and / or sustainability initiatives. In our game, tools would be the monitoring equipment that athletes use, their fitness equipment and any strategy books they can get their hands on.
Benefits
- Backcasting is highly valued by practitioners for turning strategic goals into action.
- It allows us to relate the myriad of symptoms of unsustainability to a few root causes, upstreams in cause-and-effect chains.
- Similarly, the FSSD can help navigate among and make use of the many existing tools and concepts for sustainable development.
- The method is also valued as a new perspective and focusing thought in constructive ways.
- It helps integrate sustainability concerns into business strategy.
Limitations/Risks
- Even though there is great value in understanding the conditions that must be fulfilled in the long-term future, it remains difficult to identify which actions are strategic stepping stones in the short- and medium term.
- The sustainability principles definition of sustainability is sometimes perceived as too abstract.
- It is not always clear how to apply the five levels and priority questions to ideation and decision-making.
The Natural Step, also known as the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Design (FSSD), provides a definition of sustainability, then has practitioners envision a perfect sustainable future for their product or service, then uses backcasting to facilitate action pursuing that vision of perfect sustainability in concrete ways.