Sustainability Practices of Multinational Enterprises in Developing Countries: A Comparative Analysis of Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo Inc.

Recent scholarly discussions on corporate social responsibility have focused extensively on sustainability. Corporate strategies and practices are sustainable if they create long-term value in the economic, social, cultural, and physical environments within which corporations operate. Despite the growth in scholarly interest, studies on sustainability tend to focus exclusively on the intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of sustainability initiatives and on the measurement of sustainability performance. Few studies to date have examined the sustainability practices of competing global corporations within developing country contexts. This paper compares the sustainability practices of Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo Inc. in developing countries. It uses text analysis and examines the sustainability reports of the two global enterprises to identify common themes and priorities in corporate sustainability. The paper outlines a simple unified framework of best practice that could guide policy discussions on corporate sustainability across multiple industries in developing countries