Exploring sufficiency economy concept as a sustainability strategy

Abstract

With (a) an increasing role the concept of “Sufficiency Economy” plays in sustainable development, (b) its potential to effectively deal with “wicked” sustainability problems and (c) our limited knowledge about the relevant collective knowledge scholars have created, the present study reviews all related peer-review journal articles during the past 68 years (1957–2025) in the Scopus database to identify the highest-impact authors, uncover the intellectual structure and derive the leading-edge body of knowledge in the focal domain. To identify the highest-impact authors and uncover the intellectual structure, the study adopts the systematic reviews and PRISMA, and bibliometric analysis. To derive the leading-edge body of knowledge, the study adopts the Theory Building approach. Citation and co-citation analyses reveal that Bocken, N. and Kantabutra, S. are the most impactful scholars, while the intellectual structure features four schools of thought: Sustainable Consumption, Food & Agriculture, Sufficiency Economy in Business and Natural Resources. After justifying Kantabutra, S. as qualified for theory building, the Theory Building approach is adopted to derive a Sufficiency Economy for Business Sustainability model as the frontier knowledge from his collective research. Policy and managerial implications are also drawn from the model, including aligning an existing organizational culture with the Sufficiency Economy organizational culture, adapting the existing practices to the sustainability practices and sustainability performance management. Finally, drawing upon the analyses, informed directions and limitations of the present study have been discussed to guide future research, including three broad research propositions.