Introduction
Many companies already include sustainability commitments in their contracts, policies, and supplier requirements. However, these commitments are often difficult to implement, monitor and translate into everyday practice, particularly across supply chains.
This is the implementation gap: the difference between what contracts say and what actually happens. The JARGONFREE Compass for Sustainable Contracting Compass focuses on how to close this gap. It helps companies transform sustainability goals into clear, actionable, and implementable commitments across contracts and supply chain relationships.
Companies operate at different starting points. In some, contracts are not used for sustainability, and related requirements remain absent or inactive. In others, they are addressed only reactively when issues arise. More advanced companies embed them proactively in processes and use them to drive continuous improvement and collaboration. The Compass is designed to support this progression. It does not stop at how sustainability requirements enter contracts, but focuses on how those requirements can be made to work in practice.
The Compass is designed for sustainability, supply chain, procurement, sales, contract, compliance, risk management and legal teams involved in shaping and implementing supply chain contracts across organisations. You can use the Compass as a personal guide to read, assess and rethink contracts in your own work. At the same time, the changes it points to are rarely made alone. Its full value emerges when used across teams: the insights are designed to support shared understanding and to help organizations start working with contracts in more coordinated, effective ways.
What this Compass is – and what it is not
The Compass is not about creating new clauses or requirements. It is not a clause library. It is about assessing and improving existing contracts, clauses and requirements and making them work in practice.
What this Compass is
- A practical orientation tool for sustainable contracting
- A way to understand where sustainability requirements operate in contracts
- A framework for diagnosing common problem patterns and addressing their causes
- Support for aligning sustainability requirements across contracts and related documents long-term contracts, specifications, Codes of Conduct, Supplier Requirements and individual transactions
- A helper for making sustainability requirements clearer, more consistent and easier to implement in practice
- A shared tool for sustainability, supply chain, procurement, sales, contract, compliance, risk management and legal teams working together
- Support for progression from reactive to proactive and transformative practices
What this Compass is not
- Not an automated tool for assessing or improving contracts
- Not a contract template or a model clause library (although selected links and examples are provided)
- Not a legal drafting manual or a contract style guide
- Not a new set of sustainability requirements
- Not a compliance checklist
- Not a replacement for procurement processes, standard terms or supplier policies
- Not a one-size-fits-all solution