Are We Solving the Right Problem? Some Reflections from ESG Festival 6.0

01 Jul 2026

7 Min Read

Tan Jan Li (Contributor), The Taylor's Team (Editor)

IN THIS ARTICLE

For five editions, Taylor's ESG Festival has asked its participants to care about sustainability. The sixth asked something harder: to question whether the right problems are being addressed at all.

Held under the provocation ‘Are We Solving the Right Problem?’, ESG Festival 6.0 marked a deliberate shift in the conversation: away from raising awareness and toward accountability, governance, and the harder work of embedding sustainability into the fabric of decisions, not just the language of reports.

From Awareness to Accountability

ESG Festival 6.0 marked a deliberate shift in how sustainability was discussed. Rather than asking participants to simply care more about ESG, the festival challenged them to think more critically about how sustainability decisions are made, who is accountable for them, and whether existing efforts are creating meaningful impact.

Throughout the conversations, a clearer picture of what meaningful progress requires began to emerge. Sustainability must be embedded into everyday operational and academic decisions, supported by strong governance, informed by evidence and data, and owned across the institution rather than by sustainability teams alone. Success is measured not by the number of initiatives delivered, but by the outcomes they create.

As these ideas unfolded, several long-held assumptions naturally came under scrutiny. Participants questioned whether sustainability is primarily an environmental issue rather than a governance and decision-making challenge; whether more initiatives automatically lead to greater impact; whether sustainability belongs only to sustainability teams rather than every leader, educator and employee; and whether ESG success can be measured through reporting alone instead of tangible real-world outcomes.

One of the key differences in this year's festival was the decision to begin not with expert perspectives, but with students. In a closed-door dialogue before the main programme, students were invited to speak honestly about where they feel hopeful and where they feel helpless. The concerns that surfaced were not unfamiliar: climate anxiety, frustration over the gap between institutional commitments and visible action, the desire to contribute meaningfully rather than be passive recipients of information. What was striking was how clearly students articulated the gap between symbolism and substance.

Beginning the festival with these voices had a grounding effect on the day. It reminded leaders, educators, and guest speakers that sustainability is ultimately about people and futures, not just frameworks and targets. And it pointed toward a clearer picture of what progress actually requires: embedding sustainability into everyday operational and academic decisions, strengthening accountability mechanisms, using data and evidence rather than activity counts as the true measure of progress, and ensuring student voices are embedded into governance rather than consulted occasionally.

From Pledge to Practice

Translating a sustainability commitment into consistent day-to-day practice is, by most accounts, the most difficult part of any ESG journey.

Taylor's has learnt through experience that policies can be launched quickly, but cultural and operational change takes considerably longer. Embedding ESG into institutional life requires more than a dedicated team. It requires leadership sponsorship, cross-functional ownership, consistent governance, reliable data, and clear lines of accountability. Sustainability becomes embedded only when it is integrated into normal business processes, not managed as a parallel programme.

Data discipline has become increasingly central to this work. Carbon and energy data, waste diversion metrics, participation rates, social impact outcomes, and dashboard-driven performance monitoring are all becoming important tools for assessing whether sustainability efforts are genuinely working, or simply generating activity.

On the question of student participation, the festival pointed toward what meaningful inclusion could look like: student representation in sustainability committees, co-creation of initiatives, student-led research, and participation in the materiality assessments that shape institutional priorities. The aspiration is not occasional consultation, but structural involvement.

Are We Solving the Right Problem?

The panel brought together voices from across industry, finance, governance, and the social sector — each offering a distinct lens on where sustainability efforts succeed, and where they fall short.

Ong Jee Lian: Designing for Outcomes, Not for Branding

Ong Jee Lian, Group Chief Sustainability & Communications Officer at Gamuda, drew a sharp distinction between developments that are genuinely designed for long-term sustainability and those that adopt sustainability features primarily for branding purposes. Truly sustainable decisions, she argued, are built on systems thinking, lifecycle considerations, and measurable outcomes from the outset. Sustainability should be evident in how decisions are made, not only in how projects are eventually presented.

Bea Camacho: Making ESG Information Decision-Useful

Bea Camacho, Director for SEA at IDEO, challenged the room to think about what sustainability data is actually for. ESG information becomes meaningful, she argued, when it informs capital allocation, investment priorities, risk assessments, and strategic planning. Reporting is a means to an end, valuable only insofar as it provides evidence that supports better decisions. For ESG to influence real investment and risk decisions, sustainability data must be credible, decision-useful, and integrated into governance processes from the start.

Datin Sunita Rajakumar: Accountability Cannot Be Delegated

Datin Sunita Rajakumar, Founder, Non-Independent Director and Council Member of Climate Governance Malaysia, centred her provocation on a warning against lofty goals that become a form of greenwashing in practice. Leadership accountability for sustainability, she stressed, cannot be delegated. Boards and senior leaders must actively oversee ESG priorities, ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions, and ensure sustainability is embedded in strategic decision-making. Culture follows leadership behaviour. Meaningful outcomes depend on leaders demonstrating commitment through action, not endorsement alone.

Anita Ahmad: Beyond Compliance, Toward Impact

Anita Ahmad, CEO of Yayasan MySDG, highlighted that institutions contribute most meaningfully to national sustainability goals when they move beyond compliance and public commitments into the territory of measurable impact. That means using education, research, partnerships, and institutional influence to develop future leaders, generate solutions to societal challenges, and contribute evidence-based practices that advance Malaysia's sustainability priorities.

A Tension That Remains

Across the four perspectives, one area of strong agreement emerged: sustainability must move beyond reporting and become embedded within decision-making, governance, and everyday practice. But the most significant unresolved tension concerned the pace of change. While there was broad consensus on what needs to be done, questions remain about how quickly institutions, businesses, and society can transform existing systems while balancing financial realities, operational constraints, and stakeholder expectations.

The discussion repeatedly returned to a harder observation: sustainability challenges are rarely caused by a lack of awareness. The deeper challenge lies in decision-making, incentives, governance, and accountability. Perhaps the issue is not that society lacks solutions, but that it has not consistently addressed the underlying systems that create the problems.

When the Room Responded

One of the most energising moments of the festival was the ESG Perspective Swap, which invited participants to share what they would do differently to truly move sustainability forward. Three responses stood out — each approaching the question from a different angle, but converging on a shared belief that sustainability has to be lived rather than declared.

Hema Letchamanan, Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for the Postgraduate Programme at Taylor's School of Education, made the case for redesigning education around real-world regeneration rather than academic progression alone. Her challenge to the room was direct: education should help young people repair, reimagine, and actively create a better future, not simply prepare them to compete in the existing economy.

Where Hema's proposal worked at the level of educational purpose, Farah Anuar, Programme Manager at Biji Biji Initiative, brought the conversation closer to everyday campus life. Rather than treating sustainability as a separate subject, she proposed embedding it into how students eat, commute, consume, collaborate, and make decisions. The campus itself, in her framing, becomes a living learning environment where sustainability is practised as a habit. Of all the ideas raised on the day, Farah's most directly challenges Taylor's to make a visible and immediate change to how the institution operates.

Maisie Sim, Manager of Sustainability at Malaysia Airports Holding Berhad, extended the argument further still, proposing a Living Campus and Curriculum Revolution in which sustainability would be legally and operationally embedded across financial endowments, physical campuses, and academic curricula. Her vision was the most structurally ambitious of the three: positioning sustainability not as an add-on, but as something woven into the institution's architecture from the ground up.

After the Conversation: Ideas Worth Developing

Several ideas surfaced across the festival that deserve further consideration, not as confirmed commitments, but as directions worth exploring.

Among the most tangible was the experience designed by Saving Graze: a meal prepared from ingredients that would ordinarily be considered food waste. For many participants, encountering quality food made from surplus or overlooked ingredients made the issue of food waste tangible in a way that statistics rarely achieve. More than an illustration of a problem, the meal demonstrated practically and edibly that the gap between waste and value is often a matter of design, intention, and willingness to rethink what is worth keeping. The principles behind it point toward real applications within Taylor's: food waste awareness campaigns, menu design that utilises surplus ingredients, food rescue partnerships, and structured waste measurement within campus dining operations.

The Living Campus concept, student participation in sustainability governance, and the use of the campus as a real-world sustainability laboratory also attracted substantive discussion, precisely because they share a quality that the best sustainability ideas tend to have: they are practical, visible, and scalable.

Future campus sustainability initiatives will be stronger if they are designed around shared ownership rather than student-only participation. The people who maintain, operate, and support a campus are as much a part of its sustainability story as those who study or teach within it. Involving academic staff, facilities teams, food service operators, administrators, and support staff in both the design and implementation of initiatives creates opportunities for sustainability to improve workplace practices, resource efficiency, wellbeing, and community connection across the whole institution.

What This Edition Changed

ESG Festival 6.0 did not close with a list of answers. It closed with a sharper set of questions, and a clearer sense of where the work actually lies.

The strongest takeaway from ESG Festival 6.0 was not that institutions need more sustainability programmes, but that they need better decisions. Programmes matter, but only when they are supported by governance, accountability, evidence, and a culture that enables lasting change.

The question posed at the start of the festival — Are We Solving the Right Problem? — remains intentionally open. Yet by the close of the day, participants had shifted the conversation from activities to outcomes, from awareness to accountability, and from ambition to implementation. That may be the most meaningful measure of progress ESG Festival 6.0 achieved.

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