The ability to determine if an organization is ecologically sustainable has eluded sustainability researchers for at least three decades. The inability to do so has prevented researchers from identifying which organizations are sustainable, what causes organizational sustainability, and what is caused by organizational sustainability. The measurement problem has persisted because scholars have not approached organizational sustainability as a commons problem. This paper does so and develops the ecochain, an empirical means of determining if an organization is ecologically sustainable or unsustainable. The ecochain--the set of ecosystems that supports an organization's operations--links organizations to common-pool resource ecosystems used and affected by organizations.
An organization is ecologically sustainable if its managers satisfy two conditions: (1) they disclose the organization's complete ecochain, defined as the set of ecosystems used by the organization’s operations, and (2) they verify that the stakeholders of each ecosystem consider the ecosystem to have a sustainability status of stable or improving. The first condition builds on the supply chain concept and the benefits of supply chain transparency. The second condition introduces a novel means of empirically determining if an organization is ecologically sustainable by shifting the focus of organizational sustainability away from the organization and toward the ecosystems that enable the organization to operate. To become sustainable, an unsustainable organization must shift away from using unsustainable ecosystems or participate in the collective restoration of degraded ecosystems that remain in its ecochain.
The ecochain combines insights from organizations research with those from polycentric governance research and offers the first empirically tractable means of determining the ecological sustainability status of individual organizations. Because ecosystems are common-pool resources, determining whether an ecosystem has a sustainability status of stable or improving requires engaging all stakeholders who use an ecosystem and applying principles of sustainable commons management to evaluating if the governance framework for the ecosystem is likely to sustainably manage the ecosystem. The core insight for organizations is that organizational sustainability is a commons problem, not the problem of an individual organization.
