Systemic Interactions Between Sustainable Consumption, Energy Transition and Firm Survival in the EU: A Multi-Valued Logic Approach to Sustainability Transitions

As sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12) and the energy transition become increasingly interconnected components of the European Union (EU) sustainability agenda, their relationships with sector-specific patterns of firm survival remain insufficiently explored. In this study, we examine whether sustainable consumption and national energy-transition conditions form consistent configurations associated with firm survival and how these configurations vary across countries, economic sectors, and time. Using a fuzzy logic-based analytical framework, we capture complex relationships between sustainable consumption patterns, national energy consumption, the share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption, and sector-specific firm survival outcomes over short-, medium-, and long-term horizons between 2014 and 2020. The results show that the transition to sustainable development is not incompatible with firm survival. At the same time, the configurations of institutional and energy adjustment show significant variation between EU Member States and economy sectors. Short-term survival outcomes are more strongly associated with initial market entry conditions and cost pressure. In the longer term, the sustainability of firms is more strongly associated with institutional stability and the coherence of the energy transition. The application of fuzzy logic shows that SDG 12 functions as part of a broader institutional and energy configuration, whose importance for the sustainability of companies becomes apparent gradually over longer survival horizons. These findings should be interpreted as contextual and sector-level associations rather than as causal effects on individual firms.