What if ESG’s future isn’t about ESG at all?

What if ESG’s future isn’t about ESG at all?

That was how I opened a recent discussion with Professor Gorgi Krlev, ESCP Associate Dean & Full Professor of Sustainability and Impact, and Professor André Spicer, Executive Dean of Bayes Business School.

It felt like the right place to start.

For more than a decade, ESG has shaped how companies report, how investors allocate capital and increasingly how business schools educate future leaders. Yet today, the conversation has become more complicated. Political backlash, geopolitical instability and economic pressures have all raised an uncomfortable question: is ESG losing relevance, or simply changing shape?

By the end of our conversation, I realised we had spent surprisingly little time debating the acronym itself. Instead, we had been debating something much bigger: what leadership should look like in an increasingly uncertain world.

What happens if today’s trends simply continue?

I asked both Deans to imagine the year 2036.

In one future, ESG had helped reshape capitalism into something more accountable and sustainable. In another, it had been overtaken by geopolitical instability, economic insecurity and political fragmentation.

Professor André Spicer deliberately chose the darker scenario. He described a world of rising defence spending, ageing populations, weakened international institutions and intensifying competition for energy and resources. In that future, governments, businesses and citizens become increasingly preoccupied with security rather than sustainability.

As he put it: “ESG no longer means Environmental, Social and Governance. It means Energy, Security and God.”

The audience laughed, but the point was a serious one. In Spicer’s imagined future, existential threats reshape society’s priorities. Businesses focus on securing their licence to operate in an increasingly fragmented world, while governments channel investment towards defence, energy security and strategic resilience. Religious and community institutions also regain influence as people seek meaning and stability amid growing uncertainty.

His point was that environmental and social issues would remain, but security would shape how they are understood. Sustainability would focus less on long-term stewardship and more on national resilience, strategic independence and the ability to withstand disruption.

What if we’re telling the wrong story?

Professor Krlev imagined a very different 2036.

In his future, cities are greener, renewable energy underpins competitiveness, education is recognised as long-term infrastructure, and leaders are judged not only by financial performance but by their contribution to society.

“Leaders finally understand that the issue was never mainly about sacrifice. It was about independence, competitiveness and innovation,” he said.

Again and again, he returned to one idea: successful transitions happen when people can see a better alternative. Reflecting on Germany’s anti-nuclear movement and the emergence of renewable energy cooperatives, he argued that protest alone rarely changes systems. Real change happens when people create credible alternatives that others actually want to adopt.

Has ESG become a victim of its own success?

One surprise from the discussion was that some of the sharpest criticism of ESG came from its strongest advocates.

Professor Krlev argued that the framework had gradually become overloaded. Environmental sustainability, social justice, diversity, governance, financial performance and long-term value creation had all become wrapped into a single concept. The ambition was admirable. The execution was much harder.

“The whole ESG debate… was overdoing it. ESG 2.0 is going to be leaner, and it’s going to be more prioritised,” he said.

That struck me as one of the most important ideas to emerge from the conversation. Leaders may need to become much more honest about trade-offs rather than promising that sustainability creates a win for everyone.

Some industries will change. Some business models will disappear. Some communities will bear greater costs than others. Leaders need to acknowledge those trade-offs, anticipate their consequences and help people navigate them.

So what should leaders actually do?

As our discussion progressed, the conversation became less about ESG and more about leadership.

Ownership structures. Political legitimacy. Artificial intelligence. Energy systems. Education. Demographics. None of these fitted neatly into a reporting framework. All of them demanded systems thinking. That was why Professor Krlev’s final reflection resonated so strongly: “People in this field are very good at describing what they don’t want. They’re not very good at describing where they want to lead society.”

This may be the standard by which the next generation of leaders is judged: their ability to articulate a credible vision of the future and build the coalitions needed to deliver it.

What does this mean for business education?

One question stayed with me throughout the discussion: Are business schools leading this transition—or simply following it?

Both Deans agreed that management education needs to evolve. Professor Krlev argued that measurement still matters: “Once you start measuring things… if you have no clue where you’re going… then you’re never going to do anything around it.”

Clearly, measurement alone is not enough. Students also need to understand incentives, politics, systems and unintended consequences.

Professor Spicer approached the challenge from a different direction. Rather than seeing sustainability as something new, he suggested business schools are rediscovering something they had gradually lost. “We’ve only just been through an aberration in business school education… now these debates are coming back,” he said.

Ethics. Governance. Society. Philosophy. These were never distractions from management. They were management.

Beyond ESG

We set out to explore whether ESG had a future. Instead, the conversation turned to how leaders make decisions when the boundaries between economic performance, geopolitical uncertainty, environmental resilience and social legitimacy have disappeared.

Perhaps that is why the question “Is ESG dead?” feels increasingly unhelpful. A more useful question is whether our organisations—and our business schools—are preparing leaders for a world in which every strategic decision is also a societal one.

If they are, then ESG’s next chapter will be less about preserving the acronym but instead about making it unnecessary.