Do no harm? How health care management research can advance environmentally sustainable health care

Issue: 

– Health care organizations face pressure to advance environmental sustainability. Core challenges include pursuing distant-future goals (e.g., climate neutrality by 2050), leading sustainability initiatives beyond formal authority, and making mitigation decisions whose benefits accrue in the future and outside the organization. 

Critical Theoretical Analysis: 

– Dominant management theories tend to treat the future as a strategic context or planning horizon rather than as an object of sustained organizational work. Long-term orientation is often assumed rather than explained. Leadership is conceptualized as hierarchical or professionally anchored, leaving distributed and extra-professional leadership weakly theorized. Moreover, prevailing theories assume alignment between decision-makers and beneficiaries, privileging value creation and capture while inadequately addressing harm reduction and externalized and future-oriented environmental benefits and costs. 

Insight/Advance: 

– We suggest a shift from treating the future as a given condition to be anticipated or adapted to, toward actively pursuing distant futures as ongoing organizational work. We conceptualize sustainability leadership as distributed across fragmented authority structures and reframe environmental sustainability as a governance challenge of managing asymmetric costs and benefits alongside clinical priorities. Reframing of sustainability leadership provides opportunities for healthcare management research to advance environmentally sustainable health care through managerial work. 

Practice Implications:

– We highlight the need for health care managers to actively sustain future-oriented goals over time, lead sustainability initiatives without relying solely on formal authority, and develop decision and performance frameworks capable of integrating temporally and spatially uneven payoffs.