Developing Management Capability in Sustainability Leadership

Introduction

By fostering interdisciplinary research, the special issue aims to offer ways for managers to upskill their sustainability leadership (SL). It will do this by exploring how sustainability leadership capacity can be developed by managers through addressing the three interrelated knowledge gaps concerning macro-SL outcomes, meso-SL organisational/community goals and micro-SL personal, managerial, and collective behavioural inputs. Through the contribution of authors we aim to discover the connection points across the entire SL development system for managers. It is envisioned that recommendations for building SL capacity in managers will be relevant to academics, practitioners and the planet.

List of topic areas

The contribution of this Special issue will be an interdisciplinary, multi-faceted exploration of the below four inter-related macro, meso and micro propositions:

• Proposition 1 (Macro): SL capability development for managers can be a force for ‘good’ (Giacalone and Promislo, 2013) in facilitating improved compassionate flourishing in a troubled and depleted world requiring rapid turnaround innovative solutions (see, for example, Shin et al., 2022).
  • Proposition 1b (Macro): Biodiversity loss and extinction reflects anthropocentric assumptions that limits leaders and professionals to engage with planetary health and multi-species justice. (Kopnina,2025)
• Proposition 2 (Meso): SL capability development can be applied systematically and systemically (see also, PiwowarSulej and Iqbal, 2023) in attempts to resolve or mitigate common, complex and disruptive challenges in novel and re-discovered (Nelson and Shilling, 2018) ways.
• Proposition 3 (Micro): SL capability development can have agency through the enactment of managers’ specific personal values/morals (Aitken et al., 2022; Carroll, 1991; Schwartz, 2007; Watton et al., 2019) behaviours, decisions and actions by those possessing benevolent influence (individual and collective).

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here.

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key deadlines 

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01/09/2026

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31/12/2026

Guest editors

Dr Scott Lichtenstein, Birmingham City University Business School, UK, [email protected]

Dr Paul Aitken, Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology, New Zealand,[email protected]

Dr Krish Saha, Birmingham City University Business School, UK, [email protected]

Prof. Helen Kopnina, Univerity of Northumbria, UK, [email protected]

Dr. Truzaar Dordi, University of York, UK, [email protected]