Resource Efficiency and an Integral Framework for Performance Measurement

Scarce natural resources and the associated price increases are two of the many sustainability challenges that corporations face in the 21st century. Although resource efficiency is regarded as one of the means to tackle this issue, corporations are unsure of how to operationalize the term into appropriate indicators and how to measure progress towards being more resource efficient. We therefore interviewed 28 experts with two main outcomes. First, although questions focused on quite technical steps of the evaluation process and specific indicators, experts often steered the conversation from operational details to organizational aspects such as setting a resource culture and communication. Second, although interview results implicate several pathways to assess corporate resource efficiency, the analysis indicates a fit to a common performance measurement framework. Thus, corporations can build on prior work of general performance measurement research when they aim to consider resource efficiency performance as part of their progress towards sustainability.