Beyond Green IT: Sustainable Digital Literacy as a Capability for Global Responsibility in Management Education

Purpose: This conceptual paper argues that sustainable digital literacy should be recognised as a core managerial capability for global responsibility, cultivated within responsible management education. It enables future managers to connect routine digital decisions about data, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, hardware and reporting with environmental, social and governance consequences that are frequently displaced beyond the organisation and across national boundaries.

Design/methodology/approach: An integrative conceptual synthesis connects digital and data literacies, sustainability competencies, Green IT and Green IS, digital sustainability and responsible management education. The synthesis identifies recurring responsibility gaps and develops a six-dimensional pedagogical heuristic with cross-curricular applications.

Findings: Sustainable digital literacy is positioned at the intersection of digital capability, sustainability and managerial responsibility. Six dimensions - digital materiality, data restraint, AI proportionality, lifecycle awareness, reporting integrity and digital accountability - reconnect apparently routine choices about data, platforms, vendors, infrastructure and reporting with consequences distributed across organisations, supply chains, communities and jurisdictions.

Social implications: Framing digital decisions as global-responsibility decisions helps future managers account for consequences borne by distant workers, communities and ecosystems.

Originality: The contribution is not the terminology but a distinct managerial location and a conceptual bridge to global responsibility. The paper explains how digital decisions displace environmental and social consequences across organisations, supply chains, communities and jurisdictions, creating an accountability gap, and how a literacy oriented to that gap can be embedded across the business curriculum.