Talking to Sean Harrigan this week, at the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Board meeting in Amsterdam – he used to be President of CalPERS – we got into the question of which came first, the double bottom line – or the triple bottom line?
I have always assumed TBL (which I coined in 1994) came first, because I hadn’t heard of rival multiple bottom line concepts at that point, but I didn’t know. Jed Emerson’s work on blended value then followed both, looking for ways of breaking down the implicit silos between the different areas of value creation – or destruction.
Sean noted that CalPERS had done a good deal of work on the DBL front from the early years of the 21st century, but I’d be obliged if anyone knows where and when the DBL formulation was first used.
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