Dr Edina Doci is Associate Professor at the School of Business and Economics of VU Amsterdam. She explains the challenges and obstacles students and organisations may encounter when implementing sustainability.
First and foremost, we need a general awareness of the problems we’re collectively facing. The UN SDG's provide a useful framework for both raising awareness and building collaborations and partnerships to reach the sustainability goals. What’s more, individuals and institutions need to understand that it’s in their own interests to contribute to sustainability efforts and make the world a sustainable place for all. This is the biggest challenge: changing people’s short-term thinking. It’s not easy to motivate individuals and businesses to think long term when they’re in constant, fierce competition and believe they don’t have the time or resources to spend on sustainability. On the one hand, we need to show them that this is not the case: that personal and business interests can be perfectly aligned with sustainability goals and efforts. On the other hand, they need to understand that given the pace at which our sustainability problems are accelerating, it’s no longer an abstract future that we need to save. It’s in our medium- or even short-term interest to take action and to get as many people and institutions as possible to change their ways.
Which students sign up for this, and what obstacles do they encounter?
This year the advanced leadership course was pitched as focusing on sustainability, so students from all over SBE with an interest in sustainability signed up. Out of 150 registrations, 138 students completed the course. That’s a huge number for an elective course, and it shows that the new generation of business students are deeply engaged with sustainability, climate action and social responsibility. This is very heartening. Going forward, it gives us a lot of hope and motivation to pursue our goal of accelerating the sustainability transition by using educational tools to engage students and organisations. As far as obstacles go, the corona crisis has been a major challenge: how to stay motivated personally and how to motivate companies to pursue positive social change in times of isolation and uncertainty, when they’re just trying to keep going, be it financially or emotionally.
