Enabling Digital Sustainability : A Socio-Technical Systems Design Perspective

Climate change and related sustainability crises are one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Environmental degradation increasingly translates into economic losses and social disruptions, rendering sustainability an interdependent environmental, social, and economic concern. In this context, digital technologies are widely regarded as key enablers of sustainability transformations. Yet their contributions to long-term value creation remain uneven. While digital technologies can optimize existing processes and incrementally reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they increasingly shape physical, economic, and social realities by steering energy systems, governing supply chains, and enabling new forms of economic coordination. Despite these transformative potentials, many sustainability-oriented digital initiatives - such as decarbonization strategies, circular economy solutions, or digitally enabled ecosystems - struggle to scale or persist. This indicates that sustainability at scale does not arise from digital technologies in isolation, but from the alignment of infrastructures, governance, participation, and organizational integration. Against this backdrop, this cumulative dissertation adopts digital sustainability as an overarching conceptual frame, defined as the development and deployment of digital resources and artifacts toward improving environmental sustainability, social well-being, and economic welfare. It responds to calls for more integrative and mechanism-based accounts by arguing that digital sustainability emerges from the interplay of three mutually reinforcing mechanisms. First, trustworthy digital infrastructures ensure the availability and verifiability of sustainability-relevant data. Second, sovereignty and governance mechanisms shape control, participation, and legitimacy in data-driven systems. Third, digital resources and dynamic capabilities enable economically viable digital strategic initiatives that translate sustainability objectives into scalable value creation, viable business models, and long-term economic welfare. The IS research domain is progressing slowly in investigating their interplays and underlying mechanisms. Accordingly, the overarching research objective of this dissertation is to examine how digital technologies enable environmental, social, and economic sustainability by addressing information asymmetries, governance challenges, and incentive misalignments in socio-technical systems relying on verifiable data sharing between organizations and individuals. To address the research objective, this dissertation comprises eight interrelated essays examining digital sustainability from complementary perspectives and levels of analysis. The essays investigate digital infrastructures, data management arrangements, and the capabilities required for implementing, scaling, and sustaining sustainability-oriented organizational initiatives. Taken together, this dissertation advances a mechanism-based and multi-perspective understanding of how digital technologies are configured and combined to foster digital sustainability. Thereby, if offers descriptive, explanatory, and prescriptive insights into the mechanisms and boundary conditions shaping environmental, social, and economic outcomes.