‘The structures of complex organisations are changing and so must our understanding of them, particularly in the fields of governance and sustainability. This study of water businesses around the world makes a vitally important contribution to our understanding of such business and the new logics under which they operate and provides a roadmap for the future governance of such organisations.’

David Crowther, De Montfort University, UK

In Sustainable Governance in Hybrid Organizations the author Linne Marie Lauesen explores how businesses that have succeeded in conducting sustainable governance, manage and govern their sustainable performance: in other words, how they manage to be economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable.

In this respect, hybrid organizations that are formed as businesses with a mission to be sustainable and to provide services for society – such as water companies – are a good point of departure. Water companies are highly regulated whilst working primarily for the betterment of society and on behalf of generations to come, for whom clean and plentiful water and the preservation of nature is a must.

Linne Marie has dug deep into these types of hybrid organizations in order to reveal which mechanisms of organizational governance for sustainability are at play, and how these organizations manage to balance their triple bottom lines in order to survive financially, socially, and environmentally and make a business out of their conduct. Balancing these three bottom lines in a sustainable way is explained in a clear and accessible way and the juxtaposition between non-profit and for-profit water companies will show how this model can be transferred to other business spheres.