“I am delighted – but actually not at all surprised – to see your results,” U.K.-based author and entrepreneur John Elkington says. “The U.K. has been a globally significant incubator of thinking on sustainable development, CSR [corporate social responsibility], ESG and climate solutions for decades, with things coming to a head around the time of COP26 [the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference, in Glasgow].”

Exeter in particular has been instrumental in international policy discussions. For the past several years, a team led by professor Pierre Friedlingstein has spearheaded the global carbon budget, one of the COP’s central metrics. Other Exeter initiatives, such as the Global Tipping Points Report led by professor Tim Lenton, also figured centrally in this year’s summit discussions. In fact, several of the United Kingdom’s most influential climate scientists are on faculty at Exeter, and they are part of a team of 1,500 research and education specialists.

These top global MBAs for sustainability are maximizing impact

Likewise, sustainability is deeply embedded in Exeter’s curricula, but that doesn’t make it an exception among the ranking schools. Beth Patmore, MBA course leader at Nottingham Business School (ranked 16th), points out that this is part of a broader “systemic shift” in the United Kingdom, where sustainability has also been embedded in national policy frameworks, corporate governance codes and educational standards. “[It] is increasingly seen not as a niche concern but as a foundational lens through which strategy, finance, operations and leadership are taught,” she says.

Take, for example, the business school ranking by the Financial Times in London, a popular resource for MBA applicants. It now gives roughly 20% collective weighting to ESG-related curriculum content, the school’s carbon footprint, and faculty and student diversity among the key criteria in its methodology.

Sustaining a virtuous circle

“To me, this is also a question of supply and demand,” says Frederik Dahlmann, an associate professor of strategy and sustainability in Warwick’s MBA programs. “We know that sustainability matters to our students, for their roles, organizations and future career development, because they tell us it is an important factor when deciding where to study for their MBAs.”

Almost all the programs we contacted for this piece said the same. There is what Dahlmann calls a virtuous circle that is created within this system, where faculty are making meaningful policy and research contributions, attracting students who will go on to do the same, which in turn incentivizes universities to continue to make such contributions.

But what explains this dynamic in the United Kingdom in particular? ESG has waned in popularity in the United States and Canada, with major companies and institutions reneging on sustainability commitments following the election of Donald Trump amid fears of an unfriendly business environment. There were similar fears with businesses pulling back from commitments, fearing penalties from anti-greenwashing legislation (which has since been scaled back).

According to Donald Lancaster, program director of Exeter’s MBA, the likelihood of a similar state of affairs coming to pass in the United Kingdom is low. This is not only because the U.K. government’s pioneering sustainability initiatives have broad cross-party support, but also because strong markets and talent pools have developed around them. Even prior to the election of Trump, Lancaster points out, shareholder value has long been the overriding consideration in the U.S. context. Despite many exemplary sustainability-oriented MBA programs in the United Kingdom, they operate within a different cultural milieu than in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Hugh Wilson, a professor of marketing in Warwick’s MBA programs, suggests that the reason for this cultural discrepancy may be rooted in history. “As the epicentre of two world wars in the 20th century, Europe swung towards greater social and economic equality after each,” he says. European countries have sharp memories of the problems that can accrue in a society where these social and economic factors fall out of balance. Though that postwar ethos has been diluted over time, he proposes that it continues to influence the United Kingdom’s business and educational climate.

“We depend on a socially and environmentally sustainable world; environmental and social crises tend to hit us early and hard,” Wilson says. “[The U.K.] business community is acutely aware of the risks and opportunities that these create.”

Tristan Bronca is an award-winning magazine writer and editor based in Toronto.

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Reducing that deficit is the main goal of non-profit Industry Immersion Africa (iiAfrica), which is hoping to stem the brain drain of talented students to the West when they are so badly needed on the continent to contribute to the economic transformation of Africa.

Assisted by business professors in Germany and Canada as well as Academics Without Borders, iiAfrica delivers a program that teaches business fundamentals and provides workplace internships to top STEM graduates like Marima.

Since 2017, the Industry Immersion Program has graduated 274 STEM students from 27 African countries. All of them, says iiAfrica managing director David Attipoe, “have remained on the African continent, working for businesses here, and most have gone on to be managers.”

Key to iiAfrica’s early success is a partnership between the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), a Berlin-based private non-profit business school, and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), based in South Africa with campuses in other African countries. Initially, ESMT professors travelled to South Africa to teach business principles to AIMS students for five weeks before the students moved into a three-month (at least) company internship.

More than 80% of graduates have landed meaningful jobs within one year of graduation, according to iiAfrica.

The lure of STEM scholarships

When founding ESMT dean Wulff Plinke was a guest lecturer at AIMS in 2014, he found the students were passionate about math but not, as had been assumed, interested in teaching careers. Instead, he says, “they wanted to use mathematics in the economic world.”

Plinke knew from experience that well-intentioned scholarships from Western institutions often lead African students to stay abroad after their studies instead of returning home.

With iiAfrica’s program, he adds, “it is not in our vision that anyone would leave Africa after the program. We want to bring them into employment, and we did.”

You can educate people until the cows come home, but if the jobs aren’t there, then it gets to be really tough.

–David Dunne, a business professor at the University of Victoria

Currently, students at AIMS campuses in South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda, Senegal and Cameroon and at Strathmore University in Kenya pay no tuition for the program and earn a certificate in business administration. University partners pay for internet access, housing and tutor support.

Marima, who is from Harare, Zimbabwe, joined the program in 2018. She says the business studies curriculum “opened doors to a world that I had no idea existed.” Though well-versed in statistics and math through her AIMS degree, she notes that “you don’t get to learn much about business from those disciplines.”

After the academic component, Marima landed an internship with B. Braun, a German medical and pharmaceutical device company with an office in Harare. After three months, she joined the company full-time and now is a human capital and strategic development manager overseeing a staff of 30 people. She plans to earn a master’s in business administration from the University of Zimbabwe.

A Canadian business school connection

Since 2019, iiAfrica has partnered with Canada’s Academics Without Borders (AWB) to scale up the program across Africa. Business professors from Canada volunteer their time in the classroom and train campus-based African tutors at each participating university, ultimately replacing themselves.

With this train-the-trainer model, African universities build capacity, says AWB executive director Greg Moran. “We try to collaborate with partners in the developing world to make changes they can sustain themselves.”

Like iiAfrica, AWB believes that part of its mission is to stem the exodus of graduates from Africa. One way to do that, says Moran, “is to help them build capacity in their own programs.”

Still, challenges remain: iiAfrica aims to add one African university each year to the program, but too often participating universities lack financial resources to pay their share of costs. As well, as enrolment climbs, so does pressure to secure internships, in-person or virtual.

David Dunne, a business professor at the University of Victoria and a former AWB board chairman who coordinates scale-up efforts with iiAfrica, is developing a template to add African university partners. “You can educate people until the cows come home, but if the jobs aren’t there, then it gets to be really tough.”

Attipoe agrees: “We need a lot of support from organizations around the world who believe in the transformation of STEM graduates in Africa.”

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Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management, which placed first, names sustainability as one of nine learning outcomes reported to the Ontario government.

“We can’t let our students graduate without understanding these [sustainability] principles and how their decision-making is important,” says Cynthia Holmes, associate dean of faculty and academic. The school recently hired 21 professors, adding to its diversity.

Earlier this year, it introduced a sustainability module to the flagship global management course. The school’s curriculum also includes an elective on managing sustainability internationally.

“We are trying to help the students understand that [sustainability] is the only way to maintain profit in the long-term,” says Michael Manjuris, Rogers program chair for global management studies.

At Guelph’s Lang School, in second place, undergraduate students take a mandatory module on ethics in their first-year business program. This fall, Lang introduced a minor in sustainable business for students from any discipline on campus.

Guelph’s MBA graduate coordinator Rumina Dhalla praises students for leadership in organizing conferences on sustainability practices and conducting award-winning research, in one case on reducing single-use plastics in the restaurant industry.

Business schools can only gain with a sustainability focus, she says. “I think the schools who haven’t figured [this] out will do so.”

So how do Canada’s bachelors of commerce rank?

As with our MBA ranking, schools are evaluated on five performance indicators (with weighting in brackets): core course integration of sustainability (30%), faculty research publications on sustainability topics per faculty in calendar year 2019 (30%), number of citations per faculty for those publications (20%), sustainability-focused research institutes and centres (10%), faculty gender diversity (5%) and faculty racial diversity (5%).

You can find the complete breakdown of how schools are scored here:

Better_World_Top 10 B Comms_2020_Full_Results

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The Canadian Business Youth Council for Sustainable Development, officially in operation this month, is on a mission to share knowledge and drive change – with youth leading the charge.

“Youth have a tremendous role to play in changing business education and also changing the field of sustainable business development,” says council chairman Maxime Lakat, a McGill University Destautels Faculty of Management commerce undergraduate.  “Student organizations like the ones in the council can be tremendous agents of change.” He is also co-president of the Desautels Sustainability Network, one of seven student-led business school sustainability associations that founded the council.

One of its goals is to develop a new generation of savvy leaders. With its members and input from private and public sectors experts, the council released a “Youth Guide to Sustainable Business” on its website, with links to readings, reports, videos and other material on environmental and social issues, sustainable business strategies and relevant commentary.

“The youth guide will be a vehicle for us to propagate ideas that try to push the conversation further,” he says.

A top council concern is the slow embrace of sustainability by business schools, where curriculum renewal requires lengthy academic approval. Lakat says the guide provides an immediate source of current information – and inspiration – beyond the classroom.

As important as understanding climate issues, youth need to act, Lakat argues.

In January, his Desautels Sustainability Network worked with like-minded student organizations at two other Montreal business schools to hold a two-day conference on sustainable business that drew 500 participants from industry, academia and the non-profit sector.

Also in its mission, the council offers tips for students to start their own associations and advocate for curriculum upgrades at business schools. Lakat estimates only 12 student sustainability organizations operate at Canada’s 60-plus business schools. “That is a huge problem when you realize the potential an undergraduate student organization can have in changing what a business school is doing,” he says.

With Desautels Sustainability Network, the council’s other founding members are HEC Montréal’s Groupe HumaniTerre; Ryerson University’s Corporate Social Responsibility Student Association; Association étudiante du développement durable dans les affairs de l’Université Laval; the Sustainability in Business Laurier association at Wilfrid Laurier University; the Corporate Social Responsibility Society at York University; Western University’s Ivey Social Impact Club; and the John Molson Sustainable Enterprise club at Concordia University.

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With climate strikers in the streets around the world and businesses singing the praises of serving all stakeholders, it’s a fair question to ask: what are business schools doing to keep up?

Not enough, according to a recent report in the Financial Times on responsible business education, which found “there is widespread agreement that business schools should do more to provide research and teaching for the next generation of students with greater focus on sustainability, ethics and social purpose.”

“Employers are hungry for graduates with that value added of sustainability,” according to Rumina Dhalla, corporate social responsibility coordinator at the University of Guelph’s Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics and coordinator of the MBA graduate program. But Frances Edmonds, head of sustainable impact at HP Canada, says that most business graduates lack basic sustainability skills and have no clue, for instance, how to account for the carbon footprint of a product’s supply chain.

But business schools are beginning to get with the program. More than two-thirds of the Financial Times’ 100 top-ranked MBA cohort now integrate a holistic purpose of business into at least one core course, while business faculty research related to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals has increased markedly, numbering 5,000 published articles in the past year.

It turns out that 10 of the best business schools for the world are right here in Canada, with four of the top 40 calling Southwestern Ontario home, according to a new ranking by Corporate Knights. The ranking evaluated 146 business schools around the world to see which were doing the best job at baking sustainability considerations into their core courses, institutes and faculty research and diversity.

York University’s Schulich School of Business ranked number two on the back of a world-class research program. No other business school published as many articles on sustainability themes per faculty member in peer-reviewed journals. Articles ran the gamut, with titles like “Societal Trust and Corporate Tax Avoidance,” “Institutional Transitions and the Role of Financial Performance in CSR Reporting” and “Linking Societal Trust and CEO Compensation.”

If accountants really are going to save the world, as Peter Bakker, head of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, is fond of saying, Schulich’s Charles Cho, a professor of accounting and the Erivan K. Haub Chair in Business and Sustainability, is part of the vanguard, editing four influential journals and teaching a score of courses, including the popular Accounting and Sustainability.

While he may not be a household name, Schulich’s Dirk Matten, a professor of strategy and the Hewlett-Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility, co-authored one of the most widely cited sustainable business articles of the last decade: “‘Implicit’ and ‘Explicit’ CSR: A Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Understanding of Corporate Social Responsibility,” which addresses the question of how and why corporate social responsibility differs among countries and how and why it changes.

Schulich has been one of the top-ranked sustainable MBA schools for most of this millennium, thanks in part to its top-notch faculty. It’s also a reflection of Dean Dezsö J. Horváth, now the longest-serving business school dean in the world. Before landing in Canada, Horváth’s family fled Hungary in 1956 and settled in Sweden, where the stakeholder approach to capitalism left a lasting mark on the young engineer; he has made it a central part of his legacy at Schulich. In 2016, Horváth, together with Schulich’s Matthias Kipping and management consultant Dominic Barton (previously of McKinsey & Company, now Canada’s ambassador to China) published a seminal tome called Re-Imagining Capitalism, a series of essays that reflect on both the urgency of needed action and the opportunity to achieve a wide-ranging and lasting movement toward a more responsible, equitable and sustainable economic model.

Better known for its veterinary and agricultural programs, the University of Guelph is also home to the Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics, ranked the 18th most sustainable business school in the world. Lang offers an MBA in Sustainable Commerce, with 60% of its core courses making sustainability a central theme, including Sustainable Value Creation, Business Practices for Sustainability, and Governance for Sustainability. Perhaps not surprisingly, Lang’s dean from 2009 to 2019, Julia Christensen Hughes, cut her teeth at Schulich. In Guelph and on the world stage, she is obsessed with making “business a force for good.”

In 2015, Hughes was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the 700-plus business school signatories to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative, where she repudiated Milton Friedman’s famous statement that businesses have no social responsibility beyond making money. She has also championed a revamped Introduction to Business course that “on-boards” students through “the great ethical dilemma,” a required course in corporate social responsibility that engages students with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Until recently, the main badge of honour on Tiff Macklem’s wall was for saving the world from financial collapse: when he was deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, he played a key role, from his Blackberry, in the global response to stop the financial crisis from becoming a full-fledged depression after the housing bubble popped in 2008. Since 2014, he has been dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is also the chair of the federal government’s Expert Panel on Sustainable Finance, which has issued a blueprint for rebooting Bay Street to deal with climate change and stay solvent in the 21st century.

Some of this is clearly rubbing off on the Rotman School, which ranked as the 31st most sustainable business school in the world, partly because it’s home to some of the country’s leading institutes advancing sustainability, including the Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics and Board Effectiveness, the Institute for Gender + the Economy, the Martin Prosperity Institute and the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship.

Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management ranked as the 37th most sustainable school in the world, with highlights including its Institute for the Study of Corporate Social Responsibility, the partial integration of ethics and social impact into several core courses, and one of the most gender-diverse faculties in the world (40% of its professors are female).

The fact that Canada has 10 of the top 40 most sustainable business schools in the world is worth celebrating. But the bar is rising fast, which is good for the health of society and our planet, and essential for the legitimacy of business.

For complete ranking, head to our Better World MBA results.

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