Though widespread adoption of the People-Planet-Prosperity concept has yet to occur, expanded definitions of the triple bottom line have been passing my reading stack and feeds. What’s more, it’s the most overlooked element of sustainability that is getting most of the attention. The People bottom line is getting a makeover into the social and cultural components. What gives?
The quadruple bottom line
In his Strategy for Sustainability, Adam Werbach adds to the economic and environmental components the following:
- “Social (acting as if other people matter): Actions and conditions that affect all members of society (e.g. poverty, violence, injustice, education, public health, and labor and human rights)
- Cultural (protecting and valuing cultural diversity): Actions through which communities manifest their identity and cultivate traditions from generation to generation.”
As reported by Sustainable Life Media, AIGA, “the professional association for design”, has adopted “The Living Principles of Design”, which include the following two components in addition to environmental protection and economic health:
- “Social equity. Actions and issues that affect all aspects of society, including poverty, violence, injustice, education, healthcare, safe housing, labor and human rights.
- Cultural vitality. Actions and issues that affect how communities manifest identity, preserve and cultivate traditions, and develop belief systems and commonly accepted values.”
Yes, AIGA has adapted the quadruple bottom line from Werbach, adding that
“In order for individuals, societies, economies and the planet to flourish, we must support environmental responsibility, social equity, economic health, and cultural vitality and recognize that they are inextricably linked. The confluence of these four streams is the key to sustainable design.”
The Living Principles of Design framework also includes instructions to designers on incorporating the quadruple bottom line into their work.
The quintuple bottom line (and then some)
I could argue the People bottom line should have three subsets:
- Individual - enriching and empowering every human being through education and experience (human capital or “units”)
- Social - fostering groups, networks, and communities, and cultivating connections, trust, and relationships within them (social capital or “connections”)
- Cultural - preserving and perpetuating shared goals, attitudes, beliefs, values, knowledge, and behavior goals (“content” that units share with, through, and among connections)
Sound reasonable? Likely. Better yet, could we also split the economic bottom line into internal and external, i.e. actions that financially benefit the company and those that financially benefit the community at large? And the environmental bottom line into the prevention of environmental damage and the restoration of natural spaces?
Why stick with the triple bottom line when you can have a septuple bottom line?
Terminological clarity is a desirable quality. Social sustainability does have both the social and cultural element, though to be complete it should include and emphasize the individual component.
On the flipside, here’s what I wrote in my contribution to the upcoming Age of Conversation 3, “[s]ocial sustainability gets short shrift [because] it’s hard to define and measure quantitatively; it’s intangible, processual, and complex; it’s not as sexy as caring for the environment and not as immediately profitable.” Expanding the triple bottom line, particularly the People part, before it’s widely understood and adopted may be counter-productive to that understanding and adoption in the business community.
What do you think? Does expanding the People bottom line help or hinder the adoption of triple-bottom line sustainability?
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting topic. From a ‘stickiness’ view, a simplified definition – People-Planet-Prosperity – fills one and probably the most important goal of widespread adoption of this idea into businesses: it’s clarity is easy to understand from person to person – it’s ‘made to stick.’ We can draw a parallel to the term “social media”; it serves to categorize a myriad of internet things (blogs, rss, wiki, facebook, etc.) and because the core message is easy to understand from the shorthand “user-active internet stuff” – it has been widely adopted as the shorthand for these things.
In a similar way, the P-P-P shorthand is very important to the sustainability conversation in terms of transmitting the core idea to many people quickly and thus accelerating adoption, whereas any subcategories should serve only to colour deeper discussions, not as a replacement definition for the articulation of the main idea. Going too deep with the shorthand runs the risk of confusing the core message: that everyone’s business NEEDS these things baked into the vision. From this view, People-Planet-Prosperity does a better job of delivering that core message than some of the other possible articulations.
@Graham: “Simplicity” is the first quality of sticky messages. The People-Planet-Prosperity triple bottom line is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of interpretations or classifications.
I already had problems with 3BL because planet is real, people are real, economy is just a set of behaviours of people. The fundamental issue is the equation of money with resources, both human and “natural”.
Subdividing social into justice for people and cultural raises a red flag for me, because, in my hierarchy of values, justice comes before culture, every time. I see the 4th addition as pernicious, easily supporting cultural relativism, a concept that ignores universal values in favour of frequently obnoxious practices.
@Marjorie: People can subdivide and categorize all they want, it’s all about people.