Scientific Monograph on Perspectives of Sustainability Management in Europe and Asia

Zirkler, Bernd; Brauweiler, Hans-Christian; Bordiyanu, Ilona; Yerimpasheva, Aida

Scientific Monograph on Perspectives of Sustainability Management in Europe and Asia

Challenges, Socio-Economic Transformations and Innovations

by Bernd Zirkler (Volume editor) Hans-Christian Brauweiler (Volume editor) Ilona Bordiyanu (Volume editor) Aida Yerimpasheva (Volume editor)

Law, Economics & Management

Summary

How can companies and public institutions align ecological, social, and economic goals to shape a more sustainable future? This monograph brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from Europe and Asia to provide research-based insights into this pressing question – combining theoretical depth with practical relevance. Section 1 focuses on sustainability performance management systems, supply chains and logistics along the Europe-Asia corridor. Section 2 analyzes socio-economic transformation, including regional integration, banking strategies, labor markets, aging, gender equality, and the evolving world of work. Section 3 turns to innovation and digitalization in trade, branding, higher education, AI, care and finance – revealing how technology can become a catalyst for sustainable development. The monograph invites readers to connect internal management tools with external frameworks and to explore how sustainability is governed across complex institutional contexts.

Excerpt

Foreword by the Editors

Nowadays, we are globally confronted with accelerating ecological and social challenges that endanger our common future. These pressing global issues (from global warming to unfair working conditions) expose asymmetries of prosperity and remind us that a desired minimum of social symmetry is not a decorative add-on but a condition for long-term value creation. Sustainability management denotes the integrated steering of environmental, social, and economic goals along the value chain and across corporate functions, with stakeholder orientation and accountability built in. In management terms, it means aligning People, Planet, and Profit within the target system of companies, and reporting alone is no longer sufficient. This monograph argues that sustainability must be embedded in how companies plan, steer, and reward performance, not only in what they publicly disclose. Companies should move beyond just harvesting easy sustainability wins and focus on advancing their overall sustainability development. Global frameworks, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement, can serve as macro targets that give orientation. Yet companies must operationalize them internally to avoid aspiration–execution gaps. Therefore, the focus of this monograph is not only on what should be reported to the outside world but on how sustainability is governed inside the firm, where cause-and-effect chains must connect actions to outcomes. This is considered in a global, interdisciplinary perspective.

The expectation that companies internalize ecological and social responsibility did not appear overnight. It is the product of a long normative and political evolution. Historically, the first conceptual considerations of sustainability date back to the eighteenth-century forestry tradition of Hans Carl von Carlowitz, in which sustained yield expressed a demanding yet straightforward rationality: consume only what can regenerate so that prosperity today does not destroy the prospects of tomorrow. In other words, early sustainability already addressed asymmetries of prosperity across generations and implied a desired minimum of social symmetry as a normative anchor. In the modern era, the Club of Rome debate on Limits to Growth brought planetary boundaries into public and policy consciousness. The Brundtland Report (1987) established the widely accepted definition of sustainable development, namely, that today’s generations should meet their needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The subsequent international frameworks, from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Conference or the Earth Summit (1992), to the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Millennium Development Goals (2000), institutionalized climate and development ambitions and began to shape reporting expectations and governance codes. These arrangements serve as macro targets for nations and negotiations and, by extension, as external drivers for firms’ sustainability orientation. The trajectory set by Kyoto and the Millennium Development Goals prepared the ground for the consolidated agenda of 2015. The SDGs provide a comprehensive orientation for development. The Paris Agreement defines a temperature pathway well below 2 °C, ideally 1.5 °C, which implies a net zero trajectory in the second half of the century.

Against this historical background, corporate sustainability today is no longer a separate ethical add-on. It is a management task. In line with the three-pillar model, corporate sustainability is classified into environmental, social, and economic activities that must be managed in concert rather than as separate islands. Following Elkington’s famous Triple Bottom Line, People, Planet, and Profit, this shifts the firm from a single bottom line to an integrated objective function in which ecological and social drivers sit alongside financial ones. Correspondingly, this triad provides the basic structure for a sustainability-oriented, accounting-based management control system. Such a system selects the few interactive KPIs that link non-financial performance to value creation within one coherent Plan–Do–Check–Act cycle, referred to here as the PDCA cycle.

Sustainability performance management (SPM) and SPM Systems (SPMSs) provide the architecture that turns strategy into measurable performance. This includes targets, indicators, data processes, reviews, and corrective action within the PDCA cycle. In modern information environments, digitally enabled self-monitoring and analytics should automate the routine reporting load so that management attention is triggered primarily when the license to operate is at risk. In other terms, attention is pulled when red flags appear. Crucially, external disclosure regimes, for example, jurisdictional reporting codes, are not identical to internal steering. Only a small subset of externally disclosed indicators is truly actionable for managers, meaning influenceable within short decision cycles. Hence, SPM and SPMS must select, structure, and weight those sustainability KPIs that actually move behavior and outcomes, instead of replicating long indicator catalogs designed mainly for public communication. The task is to design a performance system that couples ecological and social drivers with economic ones and integrates sustainability goals into the financial performance system.

A sustainability-oriented, accounting-based management control system stands for the integrated planning, steering, reporting, and risk management logic of sustainability across normative, strategic, and operational levels. It connects non-financial drivers, for example, emissions, safety, and inclusion, with financial performance and value driver models via transparent cause-and-effect chains. Value driver-based management, for example, residual profit and ROCE, remains primus inter pares, but it is complemented by environmental and social drivers. The Balanced Scorecard by Kaplan and Norton is a proven connector between qualitative and quantitative performance dimensions. It prevents the paralysis by pilot projects that too often isolates sustainability from the established financial performance management system. In the digital era, controllers are not merely scorekeepers but business partners and change agents for sustainability. In many settings, they are rightly placed in the driver’s seat because they combine data competence with investment logic and can translate sustainability ambitions into capital allocation, process design, and incentive systems. Integration is key. Ecological and social targets must be incorporated into the corporate objective function and compensation architecture rather than remain in detached reporting islands.

In Europe, the Green Deal and the EU Taxonomy, which is the EU classification system for environmentally sustainable economic activities, together with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and national codes, transform sustainability from a generic aspiration into investment signals and disclosure architectures. Yet external reporting remains a communication duty, not the internal management control system itself. Europe’s regulatory momentum sets the framework and leads to stronger reporting requirements for listed companies in Europe, and therefore also for their subsidiaries worldwide. This also answers the question of why Europe and Asia are considered through a single lens in this monograph. Supply, finance, technology, and consumption now cross these regions in multi-tier networks where governance styles, industrial structures, and cultural norms are heterogeneous yet interdependent. Europe’s standards and disclosure regimes diffuse along value chains. Asia’s scale, manufacturing depth, and digital leapfrogging reshape the feasibility and speed of sustainable transitions. Therefore, a comparative perspective enables organizations to learn how internal instruments, such as SPM and SPMS, the Balanced Scorecard, and incentives, interact with external frameworks, such as taxonomies, market access, and stakeholder pressure, across different institutional contexts. Furthermore, the Europe–Asia corridor is an important trade route that connects economies and has a significant ecological and social impact.

These dynamics become especially visible along the contemporary Silk Road, increasingly framed as the Belt and Road corridor. Europe and Asia are tied by transport, energy, digital, and finance links that amplify both opportunity and sustainability risk. Infrastructure build-out, logistics hubs, and special economic zones concentrate carbon, biodiversity, and social externalities that must be actively managed. In this corridor, Asian policy frameworks set the pace. Kazakhstan’s Strategy 2030 and Strategy 2050 are oriented towards diversification, human capital, and green growth and serve as macro targets for a low-carbon, resilient economy. China’s sustainability strategy, under the banner of ecological civilization and successive Five-Year Plans, couples dual carbon goals, and green finance with supply chain decarbonization and circularity. This shapes project selection under an emerging green Belt and Road narrative. These policy architectures define the boundary conditions within which firms operate, invest, and report. In other words, they shape what counts as license to operate along this transcontinental corridor.

The monograph is organized into three sections with individual chapters in order to reflect these layers and perspectives on Sustainability Management in Europe and Asia and to elaborate on Challenges, Socio-Economic Transformations, and Innovations. PART I, Sustainability Management and Challenges in Europe and Asia, lays out the fundamentals of SPM and SPMSs. It shows how firms design SPMS, orchestrate complex supply networks, and reform sectoral practices so that ecological and social drivers enter the corporate objective function. PART II, Socio-Economic Transformations and the Future of Work in a Global Economy, examines the institutional and labor market context in which firms operate, including governance programs, regional integration, equity, aging, and digitalization. It clarifies the enabling and constraining conditions for sustainable performance. PART III, Miscellaneous Perspectives: Innovation and Digital Transformation, adds complementary lenses, such as digital trade, branding, higher education, AI in work and care, and finance innovation. It shows how innovation dynamics and knowledge infrastructures affect feasibility, speed, and diffusion. Taken together, these sections illustrate how sustainability is internally steered, externally framed, and socially embedded across regions that are deeply interconnected.

As editors, we offer this monograph as a practical reading path through contemporary sustainability. PART I provides the fundamentals of sustainability management in an interdisciplinary and intercultural context. PART II considers the implications of socio-economic transformations on the management of sustainability. PART III adds the innovation levers that can enhance global sustainable development. We are grateful to the contributors of the individual chapters for providing insights into their excellent research and for enabling a truly comparative conversation on sustainable management between Europe and Asia. We invite readers to actively compare practices, instruments, and policy environments across these regions rather than assuming a single best model.

Zwickau, Ust-Kamenogorsk & Almaty Bernd Zirkler, H.-Christian Brauweiler, Ilona Bordiyanu & Aida Yerimpasheva

Details

Pages: XXII, 602
Publication Year: 2026
ISBN (PDF): 9783631945650
ISBN (ePUB): 9783631945667
ISBN (Softcover): 9783631945636
DOI: 10.3726/b23959
Language: English
Publication date: 2026 (July)
Keywords: sustainability management sustainable development Europe Asia corporate social responsibility performance measurement innovation digitalization supply chains socio-economic transformation governance
Published: Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2026. xxii, 602 pp., 38 fig. b/w, 61 tables.
Product Safety: Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Bernd Zirkler (Volume editor) Hans-Christian Brauweiler (Volume editor) Ilona Bordiyanu (Volume editor) Aida Yerimpasheva (Volume editor)

Bernd Zirkler is Professor of Business Administration, especially Accounting and Management Control at WHZ University Zwickau. His research focuses on the implications of digitalization and sustainability on management control and accounting. Hans-Christian Brauweiler is Professor of Business Administration, Accounting & Audit at WHZ University Zwickau. He focuses on financial & risk management, controlling, and the Basel-frameworks. He is head of the cluster for Central Asia and Caucasus for WHZ and holds several Visiting Professorships, honorary Professorships and Doctorate degrees. Ilona Bordiyanu is Professor and Head of the Business Department at KAFU in Ust-Kamenogorsk. Her work focuses on corporate finance, sustainability-oriented management, and digital transformation. Aida Yerimpasheva is Professor at Farabi University, Faculty of International Relations. Her research covers sustainable development, logistics corridors, renewable energy policy, and gender equality in Central Asia.

Scientific Monograph on Perspectives of Sustainability Management in Europe and Asia

Summary

Excerpt

Table Of Contents

Foreword by the Editors

Details

Biographical notes

Key Subject Areas