4. REFLECTIONS ON THE THEME Stakeholders have increasingly required organisations to be more environmentally responsible (Hart, 1995; Porter and va...

4. REFLECTIONS ON THE THEME Stakeholders have increasingly required organisations to be more environmentally responsible (Hart, 1995; Porter and van der Linde, 1995). The reasons for these demands are primarily regulatory requirements, care for the environment, the desire for an improved public image, and the potential for such responsibility to expand the customer base and increase competitiveness (Hart, 1995; Porter and Van der Linde, 1995). It has been argued that a business’s sustainability performance can also be regarded as a measure of the business’s operating efficiency and also can help determine what proactive steps in the environment may produce long-term gains. For Elkington (1999), the concept of sustainability, in essence, demonstrates from the start that it has been a difficult task to integrate a diverse set of requirements in relation to human development in the long-term future. Integrated into a contradictory context of economic, social and ecological aspects, sustainability represents an effort to balance demands and aspirations that are fundamentally divergent. Overall, this leads to a broad and controversial debate conducted at a theoretical level and in particular with regard to practical application within a company. For Hart and Milstein (2003), sustainability is a complex and multidimensional concept that cannot be solved by a single corporate action. Respecting the environment has become a necessity rather than just an idea (Cambra-Fierro, Hart and Polo-Redondo, 2008). A growing number of voices have warned of the deterioration of the environment and its negative consequences, but it has become clear that market forces are insufficient to regulate the impact of business. For this reason, it is necessary to articulate a set of rules that consider the particularities of each industry and force companies to minimise their environmental impact (Cambra-Fierro, Hart and Polo-Redondo, 2008). The existence of legislation regulating or requiring companies to assume and carry out activities associated with corporate responsibility is one of the most controversial and less consensual elements of the debate on corporate responsibility that is being held between companies and social organisations worldwide. To date, there is no agreed-upon or internationally accepted standard that, aside from being a reference to required consultation, covers all aspects related to corporate responsibility (Olcese, Rodríguez Ángel and Alfaro, 2008). Moreover, issues such as sustainable development, climate change, sustainability and corporate responsibility, among others, are currently in the public spotlight, which increases the need to manage these issues in front of business interest groups. The worry about economic development and its consequences affects society and especially affects companies, which need to find mechanisms to survive in a market that is increasingly complex and competitive. Therefore, we propose the use of models to rediscover new ways to manage not only businesses but also their objectives, strategies and policies to simultaneously support the prosperity of enterprise and promote a sustainable quality of life at the planetary level. To do this, we must rely on flexible models that enable the hybrid treatment of objective and subjective estimates and allow estimates of the future conduct of companies, institutions and social actors, thereby offering a redesign of economic relations. In figure 4, we propose an approach to managing sustainability among enterprises. Many of the techniques that we propose have been implemented in different processes in which different aspects of sustainability are involved. To illustrate, the Theory of the Forgotten Effects163´164 (a sequential processing technique that allows the cause-and-effect relationship developed from incidence matrices to enable the identification of items unaccounted for by experts due to being hidden or having an indirect impact) has been used in the selection of elements that contribute to the sustainable growth of the company (Barcellos Paula and Gil Lafuente, 2009) and in the analysis of the organic purchasing decisions of consumers (Gil Lafuente and Salgado Beltrán, 2005; Gil Lafuente, Salgado Beltrán, Subirá Lobera and Beltrán, 2006). CONCLUSION Our focus is on the future of corporate sustainability through the various instruments and management policies applied to promote corporate sustainable development. It is important to consider that in recent years, issues related to "sustainability", "sustainable development" and "corporate responsibility" have gained greater relevance in both professional and business communities at the scientific level. However, we wonder: how long will this last? Is the lack of consensus over or concern about sustainability standards going to put our future at risk? In this context, it will be essential to create the conditions for the future maintenance of the level of involvement in the economic, institutional and social issues related to sustainable development so that future generations can live in harmony with the resources that our planet offers us. It will be necessary to maintain a constant level of agreement and consensus in international institutions by creating comprehensive and flexible rules. Future protocols on sustainability would then standardise or create consensus standards and/or mandatory regulatory compliance. Additionally, to determine how to face to all these demands in moments of crisis, an official would take responsibility for the costs of compliance. What role this official would play within the state in terms of granting major incentives, fiscal subsidies, etc., to sustainable enterprises is also yet to be determined. We believe that our contribution will serve to support future research in the field of corporate sustainability and that these lines of research can contribute positively to developing nations. REFERENCES Barcellos Paula, L.; Gil Lafuente, A.M. (2009). Process of selection of elements that they contribute to the sustainable growth of the company. 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