Corporate Sustainability as a Driver of Sustainable and Agile Corporate Governance Practice—Croatian Experience

Implementing the principles of sustainability in business practices evokes complex changes in the way companies operate and behave. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the concept of corporate sustainability from the corporate governance perspective. Based on the integrative review method, a multilevel conceptual model of sustainable corporate governance practice is designed. The model connects the global, macro and micro levels of sustainability paradigm paramount impacts on the corporate governance mechanisms, thus highlighting the path for creating and implementing more sustainability-related governance practices. The applicative contribution of the paper stems from the improved understanding of the corporate sustainability paradigm taken from the corporate governance perspective, while the model contributes to the reduction in tensions that corporate sustainability induces in the processes of corporate decision-making and management. To corroborate the model operability, we have inspected the current state of the adopted corporate sustainability practices in Croatian companies. The research results show that neither strategic nor operational integration of sustainability into business models has yet been achieved. Sustainability is primarily considered as compliance-based, without strategic approach to sustainability management that would nominate clear objectives and link them to annual top management goals and performance. Recommendations for the future research are provided.