Stakeholder evaluation of sustainable development in the life sciences industry

Corporate sustainable development (CSD) can help to force the life sciences industry (LSI) to move from responsibility towards accountability. In terms of sustainability issues, which currently affect and occupy the LSI and their stakeholders, one could speak of 4 generations: • The local side-effects of operations, production, distribution and use. • The effects and risks of the used and applied technologies and methods. • The affordability and access to essential available treatments and products. • The necessity and need for new essential products or treatments for neglected diseases. In order to make corporations accountable, there have been many efforts in the field of evaluation. These efforts mostly remain very general. The problem is however that the different stakeholders have diverse understandings of the various sustainability issues. The paper proposes a 2-phased stakeholder-oriented evaluation method for evaluating CSD-strategies on specific sustainability issues of the LSI in Basel, Switzerland. During the first phase, corporate commitment is challenged against the stakeholdersʹ expectations. In the second phase, relevant stakeholders evaluate the effective corporate performance against the corporate commitment. The evaluation method was extensively tested with the stakeholders of the LSI in 5 case studies on the 4 issue generations. The method turned out to work and delivered interesting insight into managing sustainability issues.