Dalia Streimikiene

Sustainability is a key area of concern for manufacturing firms’ long-term success. However, the manufacturing industry has not been fully conscious of the potential sustainable values across manufacturing system. There is a need to better understand how companies can improve sustainable value creation. Recent research and practices have shown that sustainable operations can be one way to create sustainable values (e.g. economic, environmental and social). This review article focuses on the available empirical studies on the impact of lean and sustainability practices on sustainable performance from 2000 to 2018 in the context of manufacturing firms. Integrating lean and sustainability practices into manufacturing system confrontы operations managers with paradoxical tensions of sustainability objectives. Theoretically having paradoxical mindset will help firms’ managers make sense of and responв to such paradoxical tensions. In the context of sustainable operations studies, the issue of paradoxical mindset has been given less emphasis. Therefore, through the lens of the paradox theory, this study has developed a new conceptual framework for future research to investigate how paradoxical mindset moderates the impact of lean and sustainability practices on the sustainable performance of manufacturing industry. This study may add to the understanding of the circumstances, under which lean and sustainability practices impact sustainable outcomes.

Successful achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, is impossible without proper financial support, especially after the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite more than million academic papers related to SDG 7, only very few of them address the financial aspects of achieving SDG 7. To test the hypothesis, “SDG 7 related academic studies ignore the issue of investment in general and responsible investment in particular”, a meta-analysis is performed that includes a number of specific instruments and technics such as SciVal by Elsevier, VosViewer, Google trends, Google Books Ngram Viewer and Google Data. The results show a lack of appropriate academic support (methodology, empirical results, econometric models etc.) for practitioners to fill the existing financial gap and successfully achieve SDG 7. Among 1.2 million SDG 7 related papers, less than 100 deal with the financial gap problem measured by trillions of dollars in achieving SDG 7. This paper identifies the most promising and relevant topics for study related to SDG 7 and investment: the impact of the pandemic on decisions in the energy sector; efficiency of SDG 7 investment support and methodology for its assessment; green bonds, green loans, sovereign green bonds as responsible investment tools to advance SDG 7.

Acknowledgments
Inna Makarenko gratefully acknowledges support from the Supreme Council of Ukraine (0122U201796).
The research was supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research, and Sport of the Slovak Republic and the Slovak Academy Sciences (VEGA), project No 1/0364/22: Research on eco-innovation potential of SMEs in the context of sustainable development.