Deliverables: Products, Services & Public Policy
The rest of this website has explored how sustainability can be embedded into different activities across your organisation.
This area focuses on what the organisation delivers, whether they be products or services, public policy or programmes. Here we take a look at particular sectors and some examples of sustainable outcomes, drawing on themes and issues discussed elsewhere in the site. If the organisation is successfully embedding sustainability across its various activities, it should follow that what it delivers is also sustainable.
In this area we take a look at how three particular industries are trying to integrate sustainability into their products and services.
- The Food sector
- The Finance sector
- The Construction sector
Public sector
The public sector is also striving to become more sustainable. Public policy and programmes within government can be designed to lead to more sustainable outcomes.
Many of the important elements of developing sustainable policy are visible through the structure of this website. Sustainable policy is about setting a clear strategic approach, having effective plans and ways of knowing if you are delivering them. It will have involved participation and a cultural shift to integrate sustainability thinking. The decisions that have been taken will be based on robust evidence, gathered with a full consideration of sustainability impacts, and will integrate social, economic and environmental considerations.
The Government’s approach to developing sustainable policies has been the use of a variety of different policy instruments to tackle environmental and social challenges, including voluntary mechanisms, regulation, spending programmes, economic instruments and tradable permit systems. This approach is spelt out in greater detail in the UK Sustainable Development Strategy as part of a wider consideration of how government can influence public behaviour to be more sustainable. And in the 2005 Pre-Budget Report the government laid out its principles of environmental policy making.
This site offers assistance to policy makers in appraising and evaluating the full social, environmental and economic impacts of policies in the Appraisal & evaluation techniques module.