Perspectives · Governance & Education

Sustainability Has a Delivery Problem

Most organizations already have sustainability commitments. Far fewer can show what those commitments delivered. I spent October 1 with chapter leaders from the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), the UN Global Compact initiative that works with business schools, and I heard the same gap described from inside higher education.

The UN Global Compact opened the day with two figures. About 80 percent of CEOs say sustainability is more important to their business than it was five years ago. About half say they lack the know-how to build it into core strategy.¹ The commitment is in place. The ability to carry it into decisions is not.

That is a delivery problem. It sits between what an organization says it will do and what its projects, programs and portfolios actually produce. Business schools face a version of it in their own reporting, and they also train the people who will face it next, as sponsors, portfolio owners and executives. Both sides of that are worth looking at closely.

What PRME progress reports show about delivery

Every PRME signatory submits a Sharing Information on Progress report, known as a SIP. The deadline for the current cycle was September 30, 2026.² The faculty who prepare these reports were candid about what they contain. Most SIPs describe activities: courses offered, events held, partnerships formed. Very few show what changed as a result. PRME's own Champions group has set the goal of moving SIP reporting from activity-based to impact-oriented. That goal is an admission of where reporting stands today.

Several causes came up repeatedly. Social impact appeared in the SIP for the first time this cycle, so schools have no earlier data to compare against. The reporting template has changed from one cycle to the next, and schools often see the questions only months before the deadline. A report due in 2026 draws on data from July 2025 to June 2026, which does not line up with how many institutions collect information. When the questions move each year and the reporting period does not match the academic year, nobody can collect the right data in advance.

The data that does exist is scattered. Schools report to PRME, to accreditors such as AACSB and EQUIS, and to campus-wide systems such as AASHE STARS. Each asks for similar evidence in a different format. Faculty described going to the registrar and to vice presidents' offices for basic counts of courses, staff and graduates. Courses are often counted by title, so a construction course on sustainable building materials goes unrecorded because the word "sustainability" is not in its name.

What happens after graduation is the largest gap. Student voices appeared in this cycle's reports, but there was no way to connect a graduate's later work back to what they learned. A former student who starts a business built on lower material footprints may never link that decision to a classroom. If the school does not ask, and has no baseline to compare against, the outcome stays invisible.

None of this reflects a lack of commitment. The people preparing these reports believe in the work and give it their own time. What they lack is a stable system for showing delivery.

Sustainability strategy is delivered or lost at project approval

In organizations, strategy turns into action through projects and portfolios. That is where capital is committed, where suppliers are chosen, where a building's materials and a system's energy use are fixed for decades. A sustainability strategy that does not reach those decisions stays a statement.

The point of failure is usually authorization. A sponsor approves a business case. A portfolio board ranks it against other investments. A project manager is handed a scope, a budget and a deadline. In most organizations, no one in that chain is required to account for the project's social, environmental and economic impact before it is approved. Sustainability is then handed to the delivery team as an extra task, after the decisions that shape the outcome have been made. The PMI® GPM® Guide to Responsible Project Sponsorship was written for this point in the chain, because the sponsor is the person with the authority to ask the question early.

Those decision rights will belong to people who are in business school classrooms now. What they practice there is what they bring to the approval meeting. Last week I spoke on a panel and found that one of the other panelists was a former student of mine from about ten years ago. He is now a vice president at a global professional services firm. I asked him how the course was holding up in practice. He said that in the boardroom he was prepared to assess impact before a decision, and no one else at the table was.

That is one person, and one story proves nothing on its own. It does show what the evidence of responsible management education should look like: a graduate, years later, making a better decision at the moment it counts. Schools are not yet set up to record that. The same is true in organizations, which rarely measure whether their sustainability commitments changed a single project approval.

The two problems share a cause. In both, the commitment is set at the top and the delivery happens somewhere else, and there is no agreed measure connecting the two.

A fixed baseline closes the gap for schools and organizations

The fix starts with a baseline. Impact is a change from a known starting point, and without that starting point, any claim of improvement cannot be checked. This is why the P5 Standard defines regeneration as a measurable increase in system capacity beyond baseline. The same logic applies to a school, a company or a single project.

For PRME, the most practical step came from the chapter leaders themselves: agree on a small fixed core of three to five measures and keep them the same every cycle. The rest of the SIP can change as priorities shift. The core stays stable, so schools can collect the data throughout the year and the network can compare results over time. Because social impact was added this cycle, the 2026 reports can serve as the baseline. If the core is agreed now and collected each year, PRME will have five years of trend data by 2032, two years after the SDG deadline, when the discussion will be about what was delivered.

The same core can reduce the reporting load. Accreditors are already moving away from counting sustainability courses and toward asking how sustainability is embedded across governance, education, research and societal engagement. If SIP measures, accreditation evidence and campus reporting were mapped to each other once, a school could collect evidence one time and use it in several reports. Faculty would spend less time reformatting and more time on the work being reported.

In organizations, the equivalent is to bring impact into the approval decision. Before a sponsor signs off, the business case should state the project's expected social, environmental and economic impact against a baseline, linked where relevant to specific SDG targets. After delivery, the organization reports what actually changed. The P5 Standard and the Project Sustainability Reporting Guide were built for that sequence: assess before the decision, report after it.

Business schools can connect the two. Teaching cases drawn from real projects show students where impacts were missed and how trade-offs were made. A course that measures what students can do before and after gives schools evidence of learning to set beside their record of activity. Graduates who leave with competence they can demonstrate carry the method into the approval meetings where delivery is decided.

Results should be published every year, including the weak ones. A reporting system that shows only successes cannot tell anyone what to fix. The aim is a record of what was delivered, measured the same way each year and owned by the people who make the decisions.

About the author

Dr. Joel Carboni is the founder and president of GPM and the architect of the standards, methods, and certifications behind Sustainable Project Management®, delivered through the PMI-GPM joint venture. He created the P5 Standard, the Sustainability Competence Standard, the Sustainable Project Management® Practice Guide, the Project Sustainability Reporting Guide and the PMI GPM Guide to Responsible Project Sponsorship. For over 30 years, his work has moved the profession in a different direction. A Forbes Business Council member and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) contributor, he was shortlisted for Thinkers50's inaugural regenerative business award in 2025 for his book Becoming Regenerative.

¹ UN Global Compact, opening presentation to PRME chapter leaders, October 1, 2026. For the Global Compact's published CEO research, see unglobalcompact.org

² PRME, About Sharing Information on Progress (SIP). SIP reporting is required annually; the 2026 reporting period closed September 30, 2026. unprme.org