How collaboration can turn sustainability commitments into action
Many companies have ambitious sustainability goals, but acting on them remains a challenge. In the latest Researcher Spotlight we meet Julia Grimm, affiliated with the House of Sustainable Society since 2025. Her research explores how organizations work together to close the gap between commitments and practice.
How can companies, governments, and civil society collaborate to address complex sustainability challenges? That question has shaped the research agenda of Julia Grimm, Assistant Professor at Stockholm University.
She examines how organizations with different interests come together to tackle issues such as climate change and human rights violations in global supply chains. Much of her early work focused on collaborations between companies seeking to improve working conditions following the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013.
"What I'm interested in is understanding why and how organizations collaborate to address major societal challenges," Julia says. "Collaboration is the phenomenon that fascinates me."
By studying interactions between businesses, governments, and nonprofit organizations, her research sheds light on how consensus is built, how negotiations evolve over time, and why some collaborations succeed while others don’t.
Following sustainability through the supply chain
Now, Julia is kicking off a new research project supported by Handelsbanken that follows sustainability commitments from company boardrooms to suppliers across global supply chains. The project will investigate how sustainability goals are negotiated, implemented, and sometimes reshaped as they move through different organizations and regulatory environments.
"I want to know what sustainability looks like on the ground," she says. "A company can make ambitious commitments, but how do those commitments actually play out in practice?"
The project will also explore how companies balance environmental and social sustainability goals, as well as how regulations influence efforts to address sustainability and human rights concerns.
From ambition to implementation
As part of the Business Models and Innovation Platform at the House of Sustainable Society, Julia’s research helps explain what it takes to translate sustainability ambitions into meaningful action.
By examining collaboration across sectors and organizational boundaries, her work aims to provide insights for businesses, policymakers, and other organizations working to create more sustainable societies.
