Daring to teach sustainability that truly transforms, ETEducation
Authored By Valentina Carbone, Anne Touboulic & Lucy McCarthy.
At the crossroads of influence and responsibility, business schools play a crucial role in shaping future generations of managers – and, by extension, in how companies will confront tomorrow’s challenges. Too often accused of perpetuating models rooted in short-term profit, individualism, and control, they continue to struggle with fully integrating sustainability. Ecological crisis, inequality, social injustice: these issues can no longer remain peripheral in curricula. They force us to re-examine our teaching practices, the values we promote, how we teach, and whose voices are – or are not – heard in our classrooms. These questions sit at the heart of our societies’ future, and they demand far more than a few additional course modules.
Sustainability implies profound transformation. Yet it is still largely presented as a management problem or a new market to optimize, rather than a deep questioning of our assumptions. Business schools cling to what Castoriadis called the “rationality of capitalism”: a logic rooted in Western modernity that privileges control, efficiency, and growth, while reducing nature to a passive resource to be exploited and emotions to a weakness. These assumptions are rarely made explicit, but they shape curricula, define knowledge, and dictate dominant pedagogical approaches.
This instrumental view of the world not only legitimizes ecological degradation, but also fuels epistemic exclusion. As Descola reminds us, the separation between humans and “nature” is not universal – it reflects a specifically Western ontological framework. That same framework also sustains the marginalization of non-Western, feminist, and embodied forms of knowledge in our classrooms. Unless these hierarchies are challenged, the teaching of sustainability risks reproducing the very realities it claims to transform.
As educators, we are at the center of this tension. We work in institutions governed by rankings, accreditations, and audit cultures. The need to standardise, measure, and deliver outputs often outweighs deeper pedagogical and societal goals. We are encouraged to integrate sustainability, but discouraged from questioning its dominant foundations. This contradiction places faculty in a bind. Energy devoted to transforming teaching often collides with systems that reward conformity above all.
And yet, many are pushing practices forward. In our own institutions, we have begun to profoundly rethink our teaching. In supply chain modules, for instance, we now integrate concepts of degrowth, Global South production communities, and planetary boundaries. In other courses, we replace standardised case studies with narratives of local innovations, grassroots initiatives, or post-growth organizations. We invite students to inhabit varied roles – not only CEOs, but also citizens, farmers, even non-human species. We create space for eco-anxiety, cognitive dissonance, and emotions, while collectively imagining and preparing for alternative futures.
This is not ideology, but pedagogical honesty. To teach sustainability without interrogating the values embedded in our disciplines is simply to reinforce the paradigms we claim to critique. To teach socio-economic systems without addressing power, history (including colonial legacies), and emotions is to encourage disengagement and inertia, precisely when the world most needs moral courage.
Transformation is already underway: in classrooms, in conversations, in deliberate breaks with the status quo. To fuel it, we cannot wait for permission. We must dare to teach differently.
But these efforts remain rarely institutionalised. They arise from faculty experimentation, often at odds with established policies and practices. They are fragile, because they depend more on personal commitment than systemic support. If business schools are serious about transformation, they must go beyond rhetorical promises and create the conditions for collective and lasting change – beyond these “happy enclaves” which, while valuable, are not enough.
The author Valentina Carbone is the Professor of Sustainability Department at ESCP Business School, Paris; Anne Touboulic is the Associate Professor in Operations Management at Nottingham University Business School, and Lucy McCarthy is the Associate Professor in Management at Bristol University Business School.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETEDUCATION does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETEDUCATION will not be responsible for any damage caused to any person or organisation directly or indirectly.
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