A few short years ago, sustainability appeared unstoppable. Investors pledged trillions toward net-zero portfolios; governments competed to launch green-industrial revolutions; corporate leaders declared that purpose had finally converged with profit. For a moment, it seemed as though the logic of markets had begun to realign with the limits of the planet and the expectations of society.
Today, that confidence has dissolved into unease. The acronym ESG has become a political fault line. Asset managers retreat from climate commitments, legislatures dilute disclosure rules, and executives speak more cautiously, preferring the language of “resilience” to that of “responsibility.” What was once heralded as capitalism’s moral awakening now feels like a pause—perhaps even a reversal. Yet this reversal is not a return to the crude scepticism of the past. Denialism no longer carries legitimacy, nor can leaders claim ignorance of risk. What we are witnessing instead is capitalism’s extraordinary capacity for adaptive resistance—its ability to absorb critique, repackage reform, and continue largely unchanged. The sustainability counter-revolution is not led by those who reject transformation outright, but by systems that have quietly learned how to protect themselves from it.
The first wave of opposition to sustainability was frontal and ideological, dismissing climate science, caricaturing social responsibility as naïve, and celebrating deregulation as freedom. That phase has largely run its course. The new resistance operates through diffusion, dilution, and distraction. At the political level, sustainability has been reclassified from a shared project into a culture-war marker. What should be an exercise in collective design—how to adapt capitalism to ecological and social reality—has become a test of partisan loyalty. In many democracies, political entrepreneurs have discovered that exploiting uncertainty about transition costs is electorally profitable. By polarizing public opinion, they convert structural reform into an identity conflict. Stasis disguises itself as debate.
A similar fatigue now shapes the economic domain. Regulators oscillate between ambition and retrenchment, fearful of overreach or backlash. Corporations, having built internal sustainability teams and disclosure systems, confront diminishing political cover and wavering investor enthusiasm. In this environment, the safest path is neither conviction nor defiance but quiet withdrawal: maintaining the vocabulary of transformation while lowering its intensity. Culturally, the backlash completes the cycle. Sustainability is recast as elitism—a preoccupation of cosmopolitan professionals disconnected from ordinary livelihoods. What was once a moral vocabulary for shared survival, at least for some stakeholders, becomes, in some quarters, a symbol of moral arrogance. When aspiration begins to sound like accusation, fatigue follows. The counter-revolution advances not by confrontation but by erosion, rendering the idea of (necessary) systemic change tedious, uncertain, or politically dangerous.
Politics provides the architecture for this adaptive resistance. Across jurisdictions, we see the deliberate instrumentalization of the backlash. Climate legislation becomes hostage to election cycles; public subsidies for transition are coupled with concessions to fossil-fuel incumbents; and “balanced transition” replaces urgency as the dominant framing. This is not merely opportunism but a strategy of realignment through polarization. By keeping societies divided between those who fear ecological collapse and those who fear economic displacement, political actors preserve the equilibrium of inaction. The “genius” of the counter-revolution is that it offers both sides reassurance: progressives retain rhetoric, conservatives retain control. The system thereby sustains itself under the banner of responsible gradualism.
Inside the corporation, the same dynamic manifests as retreat by integration. Sustainability, once heralded as transformative strategy, is reabsorbed into risk management. The logic shifts from redesigning business models to hedging reputational exposure. Targets become “ambitions,” metrics become “indicators,” and purpose statements proliferate even as capital expenditures on transition stagnate. What distinguishes this phase is not hypocrisy but domestication. Genuine sustainability capabilities—what I have elsewhere called trapped competencies—still exist: expertise in circular design, low-carbon supply chains, and inclusive governance. Yet in the current climate of political volatility, these capabilities are quietly de-activated. They survive within firms as latent assets, stripped of strategic mandate. This is capitalism’s adaptive “genius” in action again: translating transformation into incrementalism, turning what once threatened its premises into a manageable sub-function. The corporation does not oppose change; it internalizes it just enough to neutralize its radical potential.
Beneath these institutional manoeuvres lies a deeper shift—the erosion of moral imagination. After years of overlapping crises, publics grow weary of abstraction. Inequality, climate anxiety, and geopolitical instability erode trust in elites, making any appeal to long-term stewardship sound implausible. The result is a subtle re-privatization of moral responsibility. Where collective vision once animated sustainability discourse, individuals now retreat to pragmatic survivalism: families securing their own resilience, firms protecting their own niches, nations prioritizing their own energy security. The counter-revolution thus succeeds by withdrawing imagination from the commons. Historically, moments of reform have relied on what one may call a moral surplus—a shared belief that collective improvement was both possible and desirable. Today, that surplus has been spent. The language of alignment persists, but its emotional energy has, by and large, dissipated.
This new form of resistance is more dangerous than the open hostility of the past. Denial can be challenged; fatigue cannot. When transformation becomes performance—when every institution speaks the vocabulary of alignment while preserving the substance of the status quo—the system achieves a deeper immunity. Adaptive resistance also distorts the temporal economy of change. By turning sustainability into a slow-motion process of procedural refinement, it consumes the one resource we cannot replenish: time. Each delay privileges incumbency and disadvantages those—whether firms, regions, or communities—trying to build the future under current rules. It produces what might be called temporal inequality: some actors own the present, others are mortgaged to the future. Moreover, the counter-revolution corrodes legitimacy. Citizens sense the dissonance between lofty rhetoric and tangible progress. The result is cynicism, which metastasizes faster than any policy can correct. Once public trust collapses, even sincere initiatives lose traction. The tragedy is not that alignment fails, but that it succeeds symbolically while failing substantively.
How, then, should those committed to genuine transformation respond? The instinct to counter cynicism with renewed optimism is misplaced. What is required now is strategic imagination—the discipline to design within constraint, to persist without applause, and to distinguish adaptation from evasion. That imagination must be institutional as well as moral. The first imperative is transparency of motive. Disclosure must evolve beyond metrics toward intent. Firms should be required to articulate how their core business models will transform, not merely report emissions data or diversity ratios. Measurement without purpose is misdirection. The second imperative is institutional pluralism. The architecture of sustainability cannot remain captive to financial intermediaries and corporate lobbyists. Scientists, workers, trade unions, civic organizations, and local communities must share authority in defining what alignment means in practice; without plural legitimacy, every rule will be seen as elite imposition. The third imperative is temporal accountability. Regulation should make delay explicit and costly. Transition pathways must include verifiable milestones—dates by which subsidies expire, standards tighten, or disclosures escalate. Only when time itself is made visible does urgency regain political traction. These are not technocratic adjustments but forms of moral architecture. They force systems to confront the one question that defensive adaptation evades: what future, and on whose behalf, are we designing?
Every great transformation passes through a moment when its language triumphs before its substance. We have entered that moment. The counter-revolution is not the return of the past but its mutation within the vocabulary of the future. It tells us that the battle is no longer between believers and sceptics, but between those who seek genuine coherence and those content with simulation. Systems rarely yield to persuasion; they exhaust themselves into renewal. Yet endurance matters. The quiet professionals who continue the work—engineers, policymakers, investors, educators—are the custodians of that renewal. Their persistence ensures that when the fatigue lifts, society will still possess the capabilities and the moral memory to resume progress. Aligned Capitalism was never meant to be a single leap. It is a long act of reconstruction, measured not by headlines but by the depth of learning it embeds. The counter-revolution reveals how far we remain from that maturity, but it also clarifies the task ahead: to keep the architecture of the future intact while the present defends itself. In the end, the durability of any transition depends less on enthusiasm than on endurance—the capacity to build when conviction falters, and to hold course when systems learn to resist.
