For the World’s Profit: How Business Can Support Sustainable Development

This edited volume brings together a remarkable array of distinguished corporate, investor, government, academic, and nonprofit perspectives to consider how the targeted pursuit of business profits can better add up to the world’s profit, broadly defined.

Chapter authors tackle such questions as how businesses can work more effectively with governments, financial institutions, and civil society to mitigate their own enterprise risk alongside risks to people and planet; how private resources, innovation, and networks can be mobilized to create value in solving major social and environmental challenges; and what types of accountability structures are needed to set boundaries, provide oversight, and create positive incentives for business performance. Their perspectives offer insights into how sustainability can be introduced into business practices, finance, and policymaking in a way that expands market opportunities and accelerates progress towards global sustainable development.

Homi Kharas is a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at The Brookings Institution. He studies politics and trends influencing developing countries, including aid to poor countries, the emergence of the middle class, and global governance and the G20.

Koji Makino is a visiting fellow at the JICA-Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development and professor at Graduate School of Advanced Integrated Studies in Human Survivability, Kyoto University, Japan.

John W. McArthur is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. He co-founded and co-chairs the 17 Rooms initiative, an innovative approach to catalyzing ideas and action for the Sustainable Development Goals.

Jane Nelson is the founding director of the Corporate Responsibility Initiative and a senior research fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School and a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development, Global Economy and Development program, Brookings Institution.