What Does a Business Owe the Place Around It?

Business never operates in an abstract space. It happens somewhere, surrounded by people, communities and land. Photo: Cesar Carvajal / Zealanding

What Does a Business Owe the Place Around It?

While I was writing The Older Brother, I spent a lot of time thinking about freedom. For me, freedom gradually became connected with taking responsibility for my own life: making decisions, accepting their consequences, stopping the habit of waiting for somebody else to solve things for me and understanding that many of the changes I wanted could only begin when I was willing to participate in creating them. Somewhere along that reflection, however, another question started to appear. If we want more freedom, what happens to responsibility? If individuals, businesses and organisations want the space to create, grow, innovate and pursue their own interests, surely there is another side to that freedom: an awareness of the effects our decisions have on the people, communities and places around us.

Lately I have been thinking about the same idea in relation to business. I believe deeply in private initiative and I admire the creativity behind entrepreneurship. Someone notices a problem, takes a risk, invests money, creates something that did not exist before, employs people and sometimes transforms an entire industry. There is an intelligence in private enterprise that I respect precisely because it does not always wait for somebody else to imagine the solution. Good businesses generate wealth, independence, employment, innovation and opportunities that governments alone could never create, and profit is obviously an essential part of that process. A company that cannot sustain itself economically will eventually disappear, regardless of how noble its intentions are.

Private initiative can be an extraordinary creative force. The question is what responsibility comes with that ability to create.

At the same time, profit tells us something quite specific: whether economic value is being created and captured. It cannot necessarily tell us the full story of what a business leaves behind. A profitable company can exhaust its workers, generate waste that somebody else has to deal with, put pressure on public infrastructure, treat suppliers badly or leave environmental costs for a community to carry. Another company can make money while creating jobs people are proud to have, treating suppliers fairly, repairing some of the environmental impact of its activity, contributing resources or knowledge locally and leaving the place where it operates slightly stronger than it found it. Both companies can record a profit at the end of the year, but their footprints may be completely different.

That difference interests me.

Responsibility cannot be the decoration

We have had a name for some of this for decades: Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR. At its best, the idea is fairly simple - a business has responsibilities that go beyond producing a return for its owners - but over time the term has also accumulated some baggage. Corporate responsibility can sometimes look like something that happens after the important decisions have already been made: a sponsorship, a donation, a few trees planted somewhere, an annual sustainability report or a polished page on a website while the core operation continues exactly as before.

The international conversation has increasingly moved towards something broader. The OECD talks about responsible business conduct, which encourages the positive contributions businesses can make to economic, environmental and social progress while also asking companies to identify and reduce adverse effects associated with their operations, products and services. Its guidelines cover areas including human and labour rights, the environment, consumers, disclosure, technology, corruption, competition and taxation. OECD

I find that framing much more interesting because responsibility is not only about what a company chooses to do with a small portion of its profits afterwards. It also asks how those profits were created in the first place: how people were treated, what happened to the waste, who carried the environmental cost, what pressure the activity placed on infrastructure, whether the business listened when its neighbours said something was not working and whether some of the value generated remained in the place that made that value possible.

The question becomes less about charity and more about the character of the business itself.

New Zealanders seem to be asking similar questions

I first arrived at this subject through conversations rather than statistics. I have been talking with different people and noticing a perception that some organisations have become extremely sophisticated at explaining what they sell, what they achieve and how much they contribute to the economy, while people are less convinced that the same attention is being given to the consequences surrounding that success. That is only a personal observation, of course, and conversations between friends or people in a community cannot be presented as evidence of what an entire country believes.

Then I looked at the numbers and realised the feeling was not isolated. Kantar and the Sustainable Business Council's Better Futures 2026 research found that 87% of New Zealanders believe businesses should take responsibility for their environmental and social impacts, while 69% believe businesses are not doing enough. Another 60% said the way companies communicate about sustainability is confusing. Cost of living remains the strongest immediate concern, but expectations around business responsibility have clearly not disappeared. Kantar

I find the gap between those numbers particularly interesting. The principle itself does not seem especially radical: almost nine in ten people surveyed already accept that businesses carry some responsibility for their social and environmental effects. The more difficult questions begin afterwards. How far should that responsibility extend? How much belongs to the business, how much to government and how much to the individual? What happens when responsibility costs money, reduces a margin or slows down a project? Those are harder conversations, but perhaps they are exactly the conversations worth having because words like responsibility and sustainability become meaningless very quickly if nobody is willing to define what they require in practice.

What would responsibility actually look like?

The answer will obviously change according to the business. A large development might need to think seriously about the pressure it creates on roads, water, housing and other public infrastructure rather than assuming that every consequence beyond the property boundary belongs to somebody else. A restaurant might look at wages and working conditions, food waste, energy use and the relationships it maintains with suppliers. A tourism company makes money partly because a landscape, town or community is attractive enough for people to visit, so there is a reasonable question about what relationship that business should maintain with the place producing that value.

For most of us, the relationship between business and society is not theoretical. We experience it every day as workers, customers and members of communities.

The same reasoning can continue almost anywhere. A landlord has responsibilities connected with the quality and security of the home being provided; a manufacturer has questions around materials, emissions and what eventually happens to its products; a professional-services company has responsibilities towards staff and clients; and a media organisation has responsibilities around accuracy, fairness and the quality of the public conversation it creates. Even Zealanding has to ask these questions. What stories do we amplify? Are we contributing something useful or simply creating more noise? Are we treating the people we write about fairly? Are we building another machine designed to consume people's attention, or can we occasionally create something that encourages someone to stop, read and think?

Responsibility therefore changes with the activity, but the principle underneath it remains remarkably consistent: understand the consequences of what you do and take some ownership of them.

That is why I would also separate responsibility from philanthropy. Donations, community sponsorships and charitable work can be genuinely valuable, and I would never dismiss them, but a company can donate generously while behaving irresponsibly throughout its normal operations. Another company might make very few public gestures and quietly behave responsibly every day through hundreds of decisions involving staff, suppliers, customers, waste and resources. The second example may never produce a beautiful CSR campaign, but perhaps it represents the deeper idea much more clearly.

New Zealand already contains another way of thinking about business

One of the things that has interested me since making New Zealand home is encountering ways of thinking that challenge the assumption that financial success, community wellbeing and care for the land must always exist in separate boxes. MBIE's work on purpose-led business points, among other models, to Māori businesses and iwi enterprises where social, cultural, financial, environmental and intergenerational objectives can be considered together. Its research describes this as a “multiple bottom line” approach and notes the importance of long-term relationships with whānau, communities and whenua within many Māori business models. MBIE

I approach these ideas as a migrant, so I am conscious that I encounter them from outside te ao Māori. I do not want to take Māori concepts and place them conveniently inside an argument simply because they sound compatible with something I already believe. Still, I find something deeply interesting in being exposed to a worldview where economic activity can sit inside a wider relationship between people, whenua, community and generations that have not arrived yet. There is a sense of balance there that deserves attention, especially in a century when many of our largest economic questions are simultaneously environmental and social questions.

This is also far from a marginal part of New Zealand's economy. MBIE's latest dedicated report estimates that the Māori economic contribution reached $32 billion in 2023, up from $17 billion in 2018, while the Māori asset base grew from $69 billion to $126 billion. The report also identified nearly 24,000 Māori-owned businesses. MBIE

There is an interesting parallel in New Zealand company law. Since 2023, section 131 of the Companies Act expressly clarifies that, when considering the best interests of a company, a director may consider matters other than maximising profit, with environmental, social and governance matters given as examples. This does not impose a requirement to prioritise those matters, but it makes clear that considering a company's interests need not be reduced solely to profit maximisation. Legislation New Zealand

This is not only a conversation for corporations

The word corporate creates another problem because it immediately makes us imagine banks, supermarkets, airlines and large companies with boardrooms and sustainability departments. New Zealand's actual business landscape looks very different: MBIE says approximately 97% of businesses have fewer than 20 full-time-equivalent employees. MBIE

Responsibility therefore also lives in a construction company in Christchurch, a café in Wellington, a tourism operator in Queenstown, a family business in Invercargill, a farm, a restaurant, a small technology company or a sole trader who employs two people. In many of these businesses, the person making a decision can be sitting only a few metres away from the people who experience its consequences. That proximity is one reason I think New Zealand is an interesting place for this conversation. We are still a relatively small society, and the relationship between business, community and environment can sometimes remain visible. A tourism operator may look directly at the lake or mountain from which the business derives value; a developer may meet affected residents at the supermarket; a café owner knows the people behind the counter; a farmer can see the waterway passing the property.

That closeness makes me think increasingly about decentralised leadership. Leadership does not have to mean waiting for someone at the top of the political or corporate system to tell everybody else what responsibility looks like. Thousands of businesses and organisations make decisions every day about workers, customers, suppliers, resources, waste, prices and communities. None of those decisions will transform the country alone, but together they gradually determine what kind of business culture we have.

Leadership does not always begin at the top. Communities, organisations and individuals all make decisions that gradually shape the places around them.

We cannot outsource all responsibility

Modern societies are very good at assigning responsibility upward. When something goes wrong, we naturally ask what government, councils, major corporations or wealthy individuals are going to do about it, and often that is exactly the right question. Government exists for a reason, and regulation matters particularly when commercial incentives encourage behaviours that impose costs on other people. Markets are extraordinarily powerful mechanisms for organising economic activity, but they do not automatically solve every environmental or social problem simply because buyers and sellers are free to transact.

Responsible business therefore cannot become an excuse for weak institutions or weaker rules. Law establishes minimum standards, protects people who have less bargaining power and provides mechanisms for situations where voluntary goodwill is simply not enough. What interests me is what happens above that minimum. What changes when an organisation stops asking only What am I legally allowed to do? and sometimes asks What is the responsible thing to do with the power and resources I have?

That question does not belong exclusively to chief executives. It can be asked by the owner of a five-person business, a manager, an investor, a customer, a worker and even an individual deciding what kind of project to create. Millions of apparently ordinary decisions eventually become culture, and perhaps leadership can be distributed much more widely than we normally imagine.

Freedom and responsibility belong together

This is where the subject comes back most clearly to what I was exploring in The Older Brother. I still believe strongly in individual freedom. I want people to create businesses, make money, take risks, challenge old systems, build things and enjoy the rewards of their work. Prosperity is not something we should apologise for, and I do not believe successful companies need to transform themselves into charities in order to justify their existence. Actually, I would like to see more people creating value, becoming economically independent and finding intelligent ways to solve problems.

But the more I think about freedom, the harder it becomes to separate it from responsibility. If I want freedom to act, my actions inevitably have consequences, and if a business wants freedom to grow, that growth happens in a real place inhabited by real people. Workers and customers live somewhere, waste ends up somewhere, water and energy come from somewhere, traffic appears somewhere and the resources that make economic activity possible have an origin. Profit does not emerge from an abstract space disconnected from society.

That somewhere matters.

Economic activity ultimately happens inside places and ecosystems that have value far beyond what can be recorded on a balance sheet.

It is probably also where the idea of balance becomes useful. We do not need to choose between a society where business is free to create value and a society where businesses recognise obligations beyond themselves. Those ideas can coexist, and perhaps one makes the other more sustainable over time. A company that destroys the trust of its customers, burns through its workers or degrades the resource on which it depends may generate excellent returns for a period, but whether it has created lasting value is a more complicated question.

Maybe responsibility is simply part of good business

I do not think the future of responsible business should be built around guilt. Perhaps one reason conversations about CSR, ESG and sustainability sometimes lose ordinary people is that they can sound as though business itself is suspicious, profit is morally questionable and companies must constantly apologise for existing. I do not see it that way. A good business can be an extraordinary social force: it can give someone their first job, teach skills, support a family, introduce an idea, connect communities, create something beautiful, solve a genuine problem or give its owner enough independence to build the life they wanted.

The question is not whether businesses should stop succeeding; it is whether our definition of success can become slightly richer. A strong balance sheet matters because without it the organisation may not survive, but so does whether people want to work there, whether customers trust it, whether suppliers are treated decently, what happened to the landscape, what consequences were transferred to the wider community and what remains after twenty years. The Better Futures research suggests that many New Zealanders already expect businesses to think beyond the immediate transaction, even while a significant majority remains unconvinced that enough is being done. Kantar

Perhaps, eventually, Corporate Social Responsibility becomes less useful as a separate concept because responsibility simply becomes part of what we mean when we describe somebody as running a good business: profitable enough to survive and grow, creative enough to solve problems and conscious enough to understand that no business exists alone.

I like that idea because it does not require us to wait for a perfect economic system or for somebody else to lead the way. It returns part of the responsibility to business owners, workers, managers, investors, consumers, organisations and individuals, and asks us to look at the footprint of what we create and consider whether some of the value generated can remain in the place that helped make that value possible.

Every business leaves something behind. What do we want that to be?

Sources & further reading

Kantar New Zealand & Sustainable Business Council - Better Futures 2026
Research on New Zealanders' expectations of businesses regarding environmental and social responsibility, including the 87%, 69% and 60% findings.
Better Futures 2026 - Kantar New Zealand

OECD - Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct
International framework covering environmental, social, labour, consumer and governance responsibilities.
OECD Responsible Business Conduct Guidelines

MBIE - The Future of Business for Aotearoa New Zealand
Research into purpose-led businesses, including discussion of Māori businesses and multiple-bottom-line approaches.
MBIE - Purpose-led business in Aotearoa

MBIE - Te Ōhanga Māori 2023
Latest detailed assessment of the Māori economy, including its economic contribution, asset base and number of Māori-owned businesses.
MBIE - Te Ōhanga Māori reports

New Zealand Legislation - Companies Act 1993, section 131
The statutory provision clarifying that directors may consider matters other than maximising profit, including environmental, social and governance matters.
Companies Act 1993 - section 131

MBIE - Strong foundations to foster economic growth
Source for the estimate that around 97% of New Zealand businesses have fewer than 20 FTE employees.
MBIE - New Zealand business structure