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Despite some academic recognition that leadership is particularly significant in reshaping the oil and gas industry’s contributions to global economic development and the sustainability of global energy supplies at affordable prices (Sharma et al., 2022), the attendant problem of how the industry’s leadership contributes towards the preservation of global environment and the maintenance of ecosystems’ balance, among other sustainability challenges, remains an academic lag. This calls for the urgent need for oil and gas companies to practice effective sustainable leadership approach at multiple organisational levels to address global environmental, economic and social challenges.

This paper adopts an interpretivist/constructivist philosophical stance, where findings have been extracted from in-depth thick descriptive qualitative research in Bahrain oil and gas industry. Companies operating within Bahrain oil and gas industry were identified as the unit of analysis. Empirical data are gathered through semi-structured interviews from senior management and analysed using thematic analysis. This paper is structured as follows: introduction, contextualisation of the UNSDGs in the oil and gas industry, literature on network leadership, research methods used to gather and analyse data from Bahrain oil and gas industry findings, contributions, limitations and trajectories for further studies.

The study’s participants argued that the emergence of transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership is essential to successfully and sustainably implementing the UN SDGs. In other words, the Sustainable Network Leadership is a contribution to the single, leadership competences approach of previous scholarship (Weber et al., 2022; Kumalo and Scheepers, 2021) partly because it evolves around the notion of positioning different network and change actors based on their capacity to lead, exchange their knowledge, effectively communicate the need to comply with SDGs and the skills to establish high density within a complex network of actors.

This study recognises its limitations in the sense that it is based on the single context of Bahrain oil and gas, and data were collected from senior management and executives only. Gathering data from a broader swathe of employees may have provided greater levels of leadership and organisational member nuances in both single and collective differences of leadership attributes.

Transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership provides a new construct in the perception (the “what”), instrumentalisation (the “how”) and theoretical re-conceptualisation of leadership within organisational change settings needing radical rethink for sustainable and successful change. The practical implications of transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership expose the way a variety of highly challenged organisational change contexts are interconnected to highlight not only their different sets of challenges but also their opportunities and the resolution mechanisms they present for organisational leaders and staff alike.

This paper identified the single, leadership competence approach as the dominant discourse in organisational change, leadership studies and presented an alternative collective set of leaders’ attributes. The less utilised network leadership concept was drawn upon to contribute network leadership attributes as a way of addressing the challenges faced by Bahraini oil and gas company leaders. Therefore, this study contributes to both network leadership, transformational leadership by expanding both domains to include organisational transformation and the leadership-of-risky change. This was done by identifying attributes and characteristics of Sustainable Network Leadership, then showing their significance as an approach to successfully and sustainably implementing the UNSDGs.

The concept of aging-in-place has gained notable significance in the last decade due to a dramatic demographic shift in global population dynamics that have considerably affected the ability of societies to adequately cater for their aging population. This paper examines some of the barriers to aging-in-place in the context of health needs, housing design and the role of retrofitting/smart home technologies in overcoming these barriers.

Using a narrative literature review approach, the authors undertook a comprehensive search of recent relevant literature focusing on five core thematic areas: health and aging, aging in place, barriers to aging in place, retrofitting and smart home technologies for successful aging in place. The authors entered appropriate keywords into interdisciplinary research databases and synthesized a coherent narrative discussing the thematic areas using the data extracted from the literature search.

There is a bidirectional relationship between aging and the home environment. Barriers to aging-in-place are mainly related to progressive decline in health, which alters the environmental needs of individuals. Appropriate building designs can significantly facilitate aging-in-place. The authors, therefore, highlight the role of retrofitting and smart home technologies as practical solutions to the challenges of the aging-in-place.

Forward planning in building design is essential to guarantee that the home environment is well adapted for the challenges of aging-in-place while also promoting healthy aging.

The paper shows the relationship between aging and the home environment and how building design considerations could enhance healthy aging-in-place.