Having an executive team focused on these goals is no guarantee that your company will become a leader in the field, but an absence of leadership makes it almost impossible. A recent study published by the Network for Business Sustainability South Africa interviewed a range of leaders to find out the three main obstacles hampering CEOs from focusing on sustainability. It concluded that a lack of knowledge around environmental and social issues was the biggest factor, combined with an inability to determine why this was relevant to their specific businesses. For those CEOs who understood the link, it was often difficult to emphasize sustainability over competing priorities.

Business schools – and in particular MBA programs – remain the main source of upper and middle management at multinational firms. Almost a third of the world’s 500 largest listed companies are led by MBA graduates. It’s for these reasons that Corporate Knights began sustainability-focused business school rankings in 2003.

In the 13 years since, business education has gone through a remarkable transformation. Part of this is due to demand from students, a generation more interested in purpose-driven businesses than before. A global survey of 3,700 business school students conducted by Yale’s Center for Business and the Environment in 2015 found 44 per cent of students willing to work for less at a company with a strong sustainability record. A further 20 per cent of students stated their refusal to work for an environmental laggard, no matter the financial incentive.

Changes have also been driven by increased demand from the corporate sector, as well as a desire by business schools to be ahead of the curve when it comes to preparing students for tomorrow’s economy.

Corporate Knights’ 2016 Better World MBA Ranking is a testament to this new sustainability-focused educational landscape. Schools from four countries and two continents head the top of the list, beginning with the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. The program continues to be a worldwide leader in sustainability, with a base of relevant research institutes and centres, faculty support and curriculum integration.

This is followed by MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Duquesne University’s Palumbo Donahue School of Business. The Copenhagen Business School and France’s INSEAD rounded out the top five. While all five programs finished in the top 15 of last year’s ranking, INSEAD managed to leap from 14^th to 5^th.

North America continues to lead the way with 53 per cent of schools involved, followed by Europe at 43 per cent. Programs in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom dominated the ranking, followed by a strong showing by Dutch schools. The top-ranked program outside of North America and Europe was Australia’s Macquarie Graduate School of Management.

The vision of the Better World MBA Ranking is to help ensure future business leaders know how to integrate social and environmental factors into their thinking, whether it’s how to do full-cost accounting, build inclusive leadership and governance structures, or engage in ethical marketing. We aim to do this by highlighting which MBA programs are leading the pack through the Top 40 list, as well as demonstrating which programs are lagging.

We’ve also created a complementary document for prospective MBA students (also here) that helps them to identify which schools are on the cutting edge of making the world a better place.

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The Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE)

Fuqua School of Business

CASE is a research and education centre that promotes the entrepreneurial pursuit of social impact through the adaptation of business expertise. It was founded by the late Prof. J. Gregory Dees, one of the academic pioneers of the study of social entrepreneurship.

World Tourism Education and Resource Centre (WTERC)

Haskayne School of Business

WTERC is a research centre dedicated to creating a greater understanding of tourism and its role in global development and to building greater international goodwill in an ecologically responsible manner.

Ethics, Organisations and Society (EDS) Research Cluster

Durham University Business School

The interdisciplinary EOS research cluster was formed in 2014 to carry out leading research into the societal consequences arising from the neglect of ethics by the institutions of global capitalism.

Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR)

MIT Sloan School of Management

The CEEPR promotes rigorous and objective empirical research at MIT on issues related to energy and environmental policy to support decision-making by government and industry.

Erasmus Centre for Strategic Philanthropy (ECSP)

Rotterdam School of Management

The ECSP is a knowledge and learning centre that contributes to the performance and effectiveness of the philanthropic sector. Its mission is to support non-grant-seeking European foundations in realizing their full potential for societal benefit.

Five notable faculty research papers

“Correlating sustainability and financial performance: what measures matter?”

Sunmin Kima nd Peter Adriaens, Stephen M. Ross School of Business

A meta-analysis of key performance indicators for a wide range of companies across the paper industry value chain was performed to understand whether disclosure- or performance-based sustainability metrics were better indicators for financial performance of the firms.

“A state-stewardship view on executive compensation.”

Luc Renneboog and Hao Liang, TIAS School for Business and Society

The researchers applied a state-stewardship view to the corporate governance model and executive compensation policies in economies with strong political involvement.

“Exploring tourists’ accounts of responsible tourism.”

Adrew Crane et al., Schulich School of Business

This study investigated tourists’ own accounts of responsible tourism experiences, finding that these intersect with but also deviate substantially away from established conceptions of the phenomenon.

“Does ownership matter for employee motivation when occupation is controlled for?”

Lotte Bogh Andersen and Lene Holm Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School

The public service motivation literature argues that public employees are more motivated than private employees to deliver public service for the benefit of society. But is this solely due to the fact that classical welfare services are predominant in the public sector?

“After Rana Plaza: building coalitional power for labour rights and between unions and (consumption-based) social movement organisations.”

Juliane Reinecke and Jimmy Donaghey, Warwick Business School

Using an exploratory case study of the governance response to the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, this article examined how complementary capacities of production- and consumption-based actors generated coalitional power to enact meaningful change.

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1. Curriculum: Only core/required courses fully dedicated to sustainability were counted under the scoring (maximum 5 courses, 30 per cent weighting)
2. Institutes and Centres: Only relevant institutes affiliated with the business school regardless of location, sponsored or run in partnership with another school, were counted towards the scoring (maximum 5 institutes and centres, 20 per cent weighting)
3. Faculty Research: All research was conducted using the business school’s website and Google Scholar. All relevant peer-reviewed publications in academic journals were considered between 2013 and 2015. Thirty per cent of the final score was derived from total number of relevant publications authored or co-authored per faculty member of a given business school (maximum total published work with faculty ration of 1:1, 30 per cent weighting). The other 20 per cent is in relation to the total number of times those publications were cited (maximum average citations of 10, 20 per cent weighting)

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