SUSTAINABILITY
about 12 students in the rst cohort that launched earlier this year in the grande école programme for master’s students. “We are still experimenting and evaluating, but we’re de nitely continuing it and could have similar formats for di erent disciplines and not just climate change. We would need to keep it to smaller groups, which would make it a challenge if we ever wanted to make it mandatory, but I think we could scale it up into our MBA programme or specialised master’s programmes.” You initiated the Responsible Leaders project about five years ago; what are its main aims and outcomes? “Again, we saw that a lot of students want to engage more with the school on sustainability topics. The idea for the Responsible Leaders initiative was, therefore, to give students a space to engage with us. In it, volunteers work on sustainability projects. This has been ongoing since 2018 and this year, we have about 20 students who are Responsible Leaders. “What’s been nice is many of the projects proposed and driven by the students have come to life. For example, during Covid-19, the Responsible Leaders proposed a sustainability certi cate. This is where students get points for taking electives, attending conferences and events or doing internships and thesis projects on topics relating to sustainability. It’s an engagement certi cate rather than anything academic, but we want to reward that student engagement. If students achieve a minimum number of points, they receive an additional diploma when they graduate. “Students worked on this project from start to nish and were the ones who presented it to our dean and academic commission. In addition, one of them remains a student Responsible Leader and now oversees the sustainability certi cate, as well as working as an intern in our team. I think that it is extremely rewarding for students to see their proposals are implemented.” Maria Castillo is social and environmental director at Iéseg School of Management, where she is also a senior professor in corporate social responsibility, business ethics and strategy. Castillo teaches courses on sustainability in di erent programmes at bachelor’s, master’s and executive level and her research interests include sustainability in higher education and organisational transformation for sustainability
relation to their professional life, which is particularly useful for executive MBA students. We also talk about stakeholders, as well as new legislation around the world. It’s about understanding how all this is going to change the way they do their jobs.” The focus is on a different geographic region each year – why is that? “We thought it would be interesting to do a deep dive into a speci c area. This year, it was Bologna, Italy, known for its automotive industry. We stay in Europe because we try to be as sustainable as possible, but there are still so many things to be discovered. Every country has di erent ways of approaching these topics and individual industries have distinct challenges. “It’s also great to get students on the ground and show them what’s happening in companies because this is not always aligned with the discourse we hear at a more macro level. Seeing how communities are a ected and how local governments are managing sustainability, how they’re collaborating with companies on initiatives – all this is very much tied to a particular region and the industries based there.” Can you tell us more about the recently launched, student-led Climate Lab? “The idea of this course is to experiment with a student-led course, where the professor is just there as a guide. Some of our students are very passionate about climate change and they want to learn more, so we thought we’d give them the space to do it. “The students must come up with what they need to learn and how they need to learn it. They talk to some alumni and companies and develop a learning process. It’s designed to be an elective each term and we had
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Business Impact ISSUE 3 2023
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