Sustainable Development Goals as a Guideline for Multinational Corporations

An increasing number of different frameworks and guidelines exist to assess the sustainability of multinational companies. These include the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Since January 2016, all public and private organizations, including multinational companies, have been invited to work together to achieve 17 global goals, including joint efforts to measure and report on their progress. This article examines the extent to which multinationals have responded to this call, how they use the SDGs as a guideline, and whether this use can provide a reliable basis for assessing the sustainability of multinational companies. The first part of the paper describes the embedding of the SDGs into the sustainability management framework, especially in reporting, and how this framework has changed over recent years. The second part summarizes the main results of recent surveys and studies about the use of the SDGs by multinational corporations. In the third part, the results of the author’s own study about the SDG reporting of the top-100 global companies are presented. The main focus discussed here is whether and how multinational companies are practicing state-of-the-art sustainability management, and whether their reporting reflects a strategic approach towards the SDG.