Beyond competition: how and why businesses are teaming up to tackle sustainability
In this article, Madlen Sobkowiak, EDHEC Associate Professor, presents how she explored with her co-authors, in a recent article, how companies are stepping into new roles as co-creators of sustainable change.
The image of companies battling each other for market share is deeply embedded in our everyday life and in our thinking. Yet in boardrooms across the globe, a shift is underway: corporate rivals are becoming collaborators. From sustainable seafood to ethical sourcing of rare minerals, companies are banding to address problems they can’t solve alone.
This shift - in form of pre-collaborative collaborations, roundtables or multi-stakeholder initiatives - is not just strategic, it’s necessary. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and human rights abuses in supply chains are “wicked problems”: complex, systemic issues that exceed the capacity of any single firm, industry, or government to solve.
Drawing on a review of more than 200 academic papers, we explored how companies are stepping into new roles as co-creators of sustainable change (1). This also means stepping into new accountability arrangements - ones that do not easily fit traditional corporate reporting or regulatory models.
Some examples are already shaping industries
SeaBOS, a coalition of the world’s largest seafood companies, works with scientists to address overfishing, ecosystem degradation and labour abuse in seafood supply chains (2). The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil has brought together producers, buyers, NGOs and investors to create shared standards and avoid deforestation.
In mining, the International Council on Mining and Metals sets common benchmarks for sustainability performance, while networks like UN Global Compact support cross-sector collaboration on responsible business conduct.
These alliances vary in form and ambition, but they share one thing: a recognition that sustainability problems are too big to solve alone (3).
When sharing (responsibility) rime with diluting (accountability)
In our recent article, "Accountability in Collaborative Settings: Understanding Inter-Corporate Sustainability Initiatives", published in Accounting Forum, we examined the different forms that these partnerships might take and what that means for building appropriate accountability frameworks to hold them accountable for the change they promise.
Collaborations create new challenges. When responsibility is shared, it can become diluted. It requires trust, shared governance, and the willingness to be vulnerable, sometimes publicly, about shortcomings. It also introduces a new accountability puzzle: who is responsible for what when no one is clearly in charge? And how would that accountability be discharged collectively?
To answer this, we looked at both accountability (who can or should be held responsible) and the related accounting mechanisms (what gets counted, and for whom). Our research shows that these two are closely linked: when collaborative initiatives lack appropriate tools to document progress, define roles, or make decisions traceable, calls for accountability can become symbolic.
In other words, without accounting systems that reflect the distributed nature of these partnerships, it becomes difficult to know whether anyone is actually doing what they promised or whether the initiative is achieving its goals.
Arguments for essential accounting innovations
Our paper finds that when it comes to monitoring these initiatives, traditional approaches such as individual CSR disclosures or audits are not enough (4). Instead, we propose a broader view of accountability: one that includes internal commitments, collaborative governance, and legitimacy in the eyes of affected stakeholders.
This may mean rethinking what we measure, and for whom. Reporting shouldn’t just be about checking boxes - it should reflect the shared ambitions and distributed responsibilities of these alliances. This means developing new accounting systems that are grounded in what matters to stakeholders, not just what’s easy to measure.
In that sense, accounting becomes a lever for transformation - not just a monitoring tool, but a way of structuring how we understand, justify, and coordinate collective action.
While sustainability often conjures images of company-level initiatives, some of the most impactful efforts happen when businesses work together to reshape entire systems.
ollaboration in sustainability is not a passing trend, it’s a response to a new reality. Or as a Japanese proverb reminds us, “A frog at the bottom of the well knows nothing about what is happening in the Great Ocean.” In tackling sustainability, we must lift our eyes above the walls of individual organisations and see the shared systems we depend on. Only then can we begin to change them.
References
(1) Sobkowiak, M., Bebbington, J., Blasiak, R., Folke, C., & Österblom, H. (2025). Accountability in collaborative settings: understanding inter-corporate sustainability initiatives. Accounting Forum, 1–32 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01559982.2024.2429229
(2) Österblom, H., Folke, C., Rocha, J., Bebbington, J., Blasiak, R., Jouffray, J. B., ... & Lubchenco, J. (2022a). Scientific mobilization of keystone actors for biosphere stewardship. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 3802 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07023-8
(3) Österblom, H., Bebbington, J., Blasiak, R., Sobkowiak, M., & Folke, C. (2022b). Transnational corporations, biosphere stewardship, and sustainable futures. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 47(1), 609-635 - https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-environ-120120-052845
(4) Madlen Sobkowiak. Corporate transparency is a step toward a greener economy, but further change is needed (2025). EDHEC Vox / The Conversation - https://theconversation.com/corporate-transparency-is-a-step-toward-a-greener-economy-but-further-change-is-needed-243215
