Sustainability in the Boardroom: an Empirical Examination of Dow Jones Sustainability World Index Leaders

In recent years, there has been a virtual explosion of interest in corporate go ernance. Corporate scandals and the need to protect minority shareholders’ interests are two of the reasons behind the development of corporate governance codes in numerous countries and corporations. At the same time, the concepts of “sustainable development”, “corporate responsibility”, and “corporate citizenship” have taken root in the business world. Although corporate governance and sustainable development have been extensively researched as separate fields of inquiry, less attention has been paid to the interaction between the two. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by examining how corporate governance systems are evolving so as to take account of sustainable development thinking. We analyze the governance systems of the leading companies in the 18 market sectors included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSWI). We present the results of our in-depth analysis of the 18 cases and propose the Sustainable Corporate Governance Model that emerges from that analysis.