Sustainable development and corporate social responsibility

Abstract

Today’s world is facing many challenges and the main ones include environmental pollution, climate change, limited resources, rising social inequalities or demographic changes. To tackle these challenges, since the 1950s ideas have started to be formed and concepts created. One of them, considered most popular, was the concept of sustainable development (SD) created in the 1960s, which includes economic, environmental and social issues and takes into account a long-term perspective that places emphasis on raising responsibility for future generations. In the face of these challenges, it is important that we take actions not only on a global scale but also (or we may perhaps say most of all) at the level of individual economic operators because only their pro-social and pro-environmental actions will allow the implementation of assumptions of the SD concept. Such a possibility is allowed by companies’ implementing the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which may be recognised as a tool for the implementation of SD principles, at the level of an enterprise. The SD concept accommodates the CSR model which assumes that the success of companies is based on long-term development that takes into account the economic, environmental and social aspects equally. Therefore, in the context presented above the following questions gain importance: are economic, environmental and social challenges reflected in the CSR concept? if yes, to what extent? how does a CSR concept implemented by a company contribute to the implementation of SD goals? Answers to these and other questions are possible thanks to a discussion on the SD concept and CSR from the perspective of a broadly understood business and an individual economic operator-an enterprise.