The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide both a stimulus and a framework for corporate sustainability efforts: This is reflected in the 2018 BSR/Globescan State of Sustainable Business Survey, where more than 70 percent of business leaders surveyed said that they are using the SDGs as their strategic north star in setting sustainability targets.

However, it has become increasingly obvious that to tackle systemic challenges like climate change, rising inequality, and exploitation of non-renewable resources, companies and other stakeholders need to work together. Businesses are increasingly creating and joining collaborative and multi-stakeholder initiatives to do this—which is aligned with SDG 17, to revitalize global partnership for sustainable development.

The trend toward private-sector led collaboration is encouraging—but it must accelerate, deepen, and broaden. For meaningful progress toward the SDGs, we need actors across entire value chains to pull together quickly and take collective action on the issues that threaten business growth and social development.

In our recent report on Private-Sector Collaboration for Sustainable Development, BSR investigated what motivates companies to join collaborations and what makes them successful. We found that collaborations are most effective at engaging and retaining corporate participants when they resolve an issue that is seen as critical to business continuity. In other words, we found that private-sector partnerships are most impactful when they are both good for society and good for business.

We also learned through the BSR/GlobeScan survey which specific SDGs companies are focusing on in their sustainability efforts. Climate action (SDG 13), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), responsible consumption and production (SDG 12), and gender equality (SDG 5) topped the list.

Read the full article about business collaboration for the Sustainable Development Goals by Peder Michael Pruzan-Jorgensen and Sara Enright at BSR.