ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
Escalating climate disruption is turning management education’s promise of ready-made answers into a liability. As environmental limits, irreversibility and non-linearity become the backdrop of modern business, conventional competency frameworks and ‘toolkit’ teaching fall short. Here, Rania Serhal from Rennes School of Business and Kévin Pastier of IDRAC Business School outline some practical curriculum moves for teaching faculty climate change
I n many management classrooms, students still arrive looking for a playbook: clear frameworks, actionable tools and solutions that deliver results. However, climate change and broader planetary challenges do not cooperate. They confront students, as well as educators and programme leaders, with a form of ‘answerlessness’ that cannot be eliminated. The resulting pedagogical discomfort is not accidental. It is a signal: a mismatch between what management education has traditionally promised and what planetary conditions now demand, ie sustained engagement with irreversibility, non-linearity and planetary limits. Current trajectories are increasingly alarming. For instance, Planetary Health Check 2025 shows that ocean acidification has become the seventh planetary boundary to be transgressed. This points to a fundamentally different planetary condition, often captured by the concept of the Anthropocene: a world in which human activity reshapes Earth systems. For business schools, this horizon is deeply unsettling. Management education is now increasingly criticised for struggling to engage meaningfully with the climate imperative. Even within responsible management education, a hidden curriculum persists: many responses are still shaped by dominant assumptions and ideologies of growth, competitiveness and capitalism. As planetary disruptions intensify and pathways narrow, such approaches appear increasingly insufficient. What is at stake is not simply refining existing models, but rethinking what management, organisation and economic activity can mean under radically altered planetary conditions – and what management education can plausibly promise under those same conditions. This is where the implications sharpen for business schools. The challenge is not merely curricular or technical; it is fundamentally conceptual in nature. This planetary regime places management education in situations that cannot be met through incremental adaptation alone: it calls for the capacity to question dominant
assumptions, to envision alternatives that do not yet exist and to remain open to unfamiliar ways of organising and valuing. Imagination, therefore, emerges as a core capability for climate change management learning and education. When assumptions collapse, imagination is required The notion of the Anthropocene captures more than the scale of ecological degradation; it marks a profound and non- negotiable rupture. Under Anthropocene conditions, climate and planetary disruptions no longer behave like a conventional managerial problem that can be isolated, analysed and solved. Instead, their effects unfold across multiple temporal horizons, involve irreversible losses and generate cascading consequences that escape linear cause-effect thinking. In practice, the problem refuses to stay inside the boundaries we are used to drawing around it. In such a context, the foundational premises of managerial rationality become increasingly fragile. Familiar reflexes such as planning, forecasting and optimisation, lose much of their relevance, exposing the limits of approaches designed for a stable and predictable world that no longer exists. For education, this makes it imperative to revisit conceptual frameworks and practices and to mobilise new paradigms. Imagination is pivotal here because it operates as both a critical and a generative capacity. It questions dominant rationalities while enabling the exploration of alternative organisational and socio-economic arrangements. Conceptualising imagination beyond creativity If imagination operates as both a critical and generative capacity, the question becomes how it should be conceptualised. Early responses in management education largely extended existing repertoires, such as risk metrics, ESG indicators and responsible leadership competencies. Yet these instruments often
Ambition • ISSUE 4 • 2026 39
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