Learning to Navigate Sustainability: Governance, Boundaries, and the Limits of Organisational Translation in a Multinational Corporation

Sammanfattning

Sustainability has shifted from a voluntary commitment to a mandatory governance obligation for multinational corporations, driven by regulatory frameworks including the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, alongside intensifying pressures from investors, customers, and society. Yet while researchers have extensively examined what organisations commit to and how they perform against sustainability targets, comparatively little is understood about how sustainability actually travels through large, complex organisations. How it moves from boardroom decisions to everyday managerial practice, and why that process succeeds in some places but stalls in others, remains underexplored.This study examines exactly that process, using A.P. Møller - Mærsk A/S as a single in-depth case study, to answer the following research question: How is sustainability translated across the organisational boundaries of a multinational corporation, and what determines the end result of that translation? Empirical material was generated through eighteen semi-structured interviews with managers across executive, corporate, functional, and operational levels, complemented by document analysis of the 2025 Annual Report and Sustainability Statement, and observation of Maersk's Annual General Meeting on 25th March 2026.The findings show that Maersk has built a sophisticated governance system to carry sustainability from regulatory obligation through to operational practice. A shared framework, the Double Materiality Assessment, assigns clear ownership and accountability across the organisation, allowing different functions to work from a common reference point even when they interpret sustainability differently. This system works well: sustainability is communicated consistently, responsibilities are clearly assigned, and each function adapts the shared agenda to fit its own professional context. But the study also identifies where this system reaches its limit. At the point where sustainability must compete directly with local operational priorities, where a manager must choose between a sustainability expectation and a more pressing business demand, no governance architecture can fully determine the outcome. What governs that final crossing is not structure or policy, but individual judgment, relational knowledge, and institutional experience that formal systems cannot encode. The central finding is therefore that the limits of sustainability translation are not set by how well-designed the governance system is, but by the nature of the boundary that the system, by its own logic, cannot fully cross.