- Published by
- ILO Systems Change Initiative
This brief explores why many MSD projects are not yet “green” and offers three key recommendations to align MSD with environmental sustainability.
- First, it urges practitioners to move beyond narrow value chain framing, which can limit the ability to tackle collective environmental challenges.
- Second, it highlights the need for MSD projects to engage more with policy-level change, especially to correct market failures around environmental externalities.
- Third, it recommends leveraging unconventional drivers of change - such as social norms, public sector actors, or early adopters motivated by more than profit - to strengthen weak green business cases.
The brief concludes that recalibrating MSD to address environmental crises is essential, and doing so requires rethinking established practices and assumptions.
Rather than relying solely on market logic, green MSD must embrace broader, more adaptive strategies to support a just transition and build truly sustainable systems.