Bridging science, policy, practice and purpose: global insights from sustainability leaders driving transformative change

Stephanie Moore , Unique N. Keke, Rebekah Mihm, Nelleke Hoffs, Brenda Togo, Gemma Dunjo, Vanesa Hernandez-Jackson, Ayesha Mehrotra, Amy Sellers, David Eric Myles , Camila Hsu Guimarães, Jen Jones, Anders Tarlebø Løvik , Alua Suleismenova, Monica Mamut, Kara Mitchell , Amanda Reichertz Goetsch, Ahmad Khalouf, Mark Levin, Katrina Wilkins, Esther Simbisai Chizhande, Lee McDougall, Desiree Liddle-Beeren, Romy Gakh Baram, Joslyn McKenzie, Uddipan Das Gupta, Christelle Aimee Umuhire, Marccus D Hendricks, Tammy Tran, Joyce Ann Panaligan Quinan, Omer Levy, Tatiana Alexa, Anab Mahmood , Mariajulia Martínez-Acosta, Manoella Alves, Shatha Qaqish-Clavering

Seventeen percent of the Sustainable Development Goals are currently on track to be achieved by 2030. That number points to a problem that better frameworks and more ambitious targets have not resolved: the gap between sustainability policy and operational delivery is not primarily a design problem. It is, at least in part, a leadership problem. This study examines how that problem is experienced and navigated by the people closest to it: 37 experienced sustainability and climate leaders working across six continents, multiple sectors, and national to global operational scales, all of whom completed executive education programmes at Harvard University in 2025. Using a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods design, we analysed open-ended survey responses through iterative open, axial, and selective coding, complemented by descriptive quantitative context. Five themes emerged from the data: sustainability challenges experienced as interconnected system pressures; leadership as a purpose-driven, systems-oriented practice; the persistent gap between governance ambition and implementation reality; innovation and collaboration as the practical mechanisms through which impact is achieved; and strong, largely unprompted support for a Global Sustainability Leadership Framework grounded in practitioner experience. Across all five themes, the findings point toward a consistent picture: sustainability leadership is not defined by positional authority or technical expertise but by the capacity to hold fragmented systems together, sustain ethical commitment under institutional pressure, and carry policy intent across the distance between ambition and action. Purpose, systems thinking, collaboration, and adaptive learning emerged not as aspirational orientations but as the practical tools experienced leaders reach for when governance conditions work against them. These findings contribute empirical grounding to sustainability leadership theory, reframe the policy-practice gap as a leadership and capability challenge, and offer a set of practitioner-derived orientations that could inform future sustainability leadership frameworks: frameworks that provide shared foundations for practice without prescribing uniform solutions, and that are designed to complement rather than replace existing global sustainability architectures.