Just as sustainable business practice at the global level is still in its infancy, so is business education for global responsibility and sustainability.
2017 marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of ‘One Planet Business: Creating Value within Planetary Limits’, a visionary report co-authored by WWF and SustainAbility. At the time, its analysis was profound and far-reaching – that business and its stakeholders must find ways to meet human demand within the limits of one planet. Ten years on, many progressive businesses have embraced this ambition and made great strides towards becoming One Planet businesses.
However, One Planet business leaders remain in woefully short supply. Business education has a key role to play in equipping business leaders and managers with the right mindsets, values and tools to become One Planet businesses.
To mark the 10th anniversary of ‘One Planet Business’ in 2017, we are launching One Planet Education Networks to accelerate the mainstreaming of responsible and sustainable business education.
Our ambition is to bring progressive business schools together with a global faculty of academic and practitioner experts into a ‘think and act’ network that will lead the way to globally responsible business and management education. We want OPEN to be truly global, with a special emphasis on the G20, BRICS, MINT and N11 countries.
Our objectives are as follows:
- To provide a conceptual framework, inspired by several initiatives such as the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), the 50+20 Agenda and the work of WWF on the One Planet Leaders and One Planet MBA programmes.
- To support business schools in their transformation. Almost ten years of working in partnership with business schools and corporates has taught us that we have much to learn from each other. As such, we are hoping to leverage the expertise of many individual partners to the benefit of the entire network.
- To leverage the strength, breadth, geographical reach and collective creativity of the OPEN network to build a global brand in responsible business education that can deliver at scale around the world.