When sustainability initiatives fail, most attention focuses on why the initiative failed. However, Crystal Reeck argues that diagnosing how an initiative failed, before considering why it failed, is an important but often overlooked step in preventing and remedying future failures.

Reeck and her colleagues created a framework that identifies five systematic ways in which sustainability interventions can fail. This framework arms sustainability scholars, managers and policymakers with a new tool to better diagnose failed interventions and make adjustments to transform the failure into a future success.