In Search of Sustainability Knowledge: How Organizations Manage Sustainability Knowledge - A Literature Review.

The United Nations (UN) 2030 agenda for sustainable development outlines seventeen concrete goals that encourage organizations and individuals to actively participate in rendering global societal activities more sustainable (United Nations, 2015). Organizations that aspire to be responsible global citizens need to be economically viable, and socially and environmentally responsible in their actions and provisions of goods and services. To accomplish these goals, they need to learn what sustainability means and how to institutionalize its principles. This paper proposes a three-step process for sustainability knowledge learning: 1) Learning what to know: determining which knowledge is needed; 2) Learning how to learn this knowledge: developing strategies to identify sources for the needed sustainability knowledge (external); 3) Learning the knowledge and applying it: developing knowledge management practices that enable absorption and dissemination of requisite knowledge throughout the organization (internal). Based on an exploratory literature review, it can be concluded that several comprehensive models for sustainability knowledge management exist that emphasize internal processes (step 3). Fewer examples are found that consider the second external step of where and how to obtain the needed knowledge, and only one source was found that addresses the fact that before learning of sustainability, one needs to understand what needs to be learned (step 1). It may be the systemic character of sustainability knowledge - which is not yet fully recognized in the literature - that is at the heart of the challenges encountered in developing a comprehensive knowledge management strategy. This paper also finds that a clear definition of sustainability knowledge does not yet exist. Various terms are used, and often only the environmental aspect is studied. In conclusion, this paper is a call for more research to establish a clearer view of what sustainability knowledge is, and based on that, a more detailed development of effective knowledge management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]