Assessing the Sustainability of Peer-to-Peer Sharing Platforms: A Holistic Evaluation Framework

The growing awareness of social and environmental topics such as climate change, social inequality, and poverty from humanity has driven global efforts toward sustainable development through concrete policy initiatives. In this changed socio-economic context and with the rise of IT technologies, the Sharing Economy model has spread thanks to digital economy platforms. These platforms fit in the contest of Closed-Loop Supply Chain (CLSC) facilitating the reuse, regeneration and sharing of products, things the resources are re-integrated in the economic system, reducing the need for production and minimising waste. The growth of digital sharing platforms has raised concerns about their role in supporting social and environmentally sustainable consumption. In line with this, the evaluation of the governance of these platforms also raises questions regarding the management of power and the balance between the interests of users and owners. In this context, current literature lacks a comprehensive framework for assessing the social-environmental sustainability of these platforms and the form of governance that characterises them. To tackle this issue, the paper proposes an innovative holistic framework to assess the sustainability of digital platforms, with a focus on Peer-to-Peer platforms. The framework is created adapting and integrating protocols, variables and framings already presents in the literature. The study aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the social, environmental impacts and types of governance of these platforms. Then the framework obtained is applied to a pool of forty P2P platforms, enabling a detailed assessment of their current sustainability practices and governance structures. The findings contribute to the literature by proposing a holistic framework to evaluate the sustainability of digital platforms in the sharing economy and provide a systematic approach to understanding their role in the global transition towards sustainability.