Why, despite growing organisational commitment and professionalisation, do corporate sustainability initiatives seem ineffective or insufficient to achieve system-level outcomes of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and transformative change of markets towards net zero, increased biodiversity and circularity? In this paper, we propose that this failure is due to what we refer to as the double abstraction process inherent to corporate sustainability. To make sustainability manageable, organisations rely on the abstractions of virtualisation and moralisation to translate the natural environment’s biophysical properties into data and quantified units for the purpose of integrating sustainability into standard business practices and convincing customers and stakeholders of their green credentials. We develop a conceptual framework which unpacks the double abstraction process and its consequences. The framework highlights the limitations of the current corporate sustainability paradigm and reveals how calculative, ethical and bridging practices shape sustainability initiatives while constraining their transformative potential.
