Sustainable Business, Finance and Circular Economy
The first of the new electives, Sustainable Business, Finance and Circular Economy (combined master level JUS5525 and bachelor level JUR1525), started up this term, with the lectures held over two weeks in August and September 2023. We have asked Beate Sjåfjell about her experience as responsible for the elective: ‘It was truly an inspiring semester start, with an international group of students, who engaged actively in the discussions, and asked insightful questions. I am grateful to them and to my colleagues, Jukka Mähönen, Eléonore Maitre-Ekern and Linn Anker-Sørensen, as guest lecturers in the course. The students had the opportunity to present in the course room, on topics of their own choice, and I was impressed by their contributions.’
Blogging for Sustainability with a new student series
In addition to having the opportunity to present in the course room, all students had an innovative work requirement to submit before the exams: Write a blog-style essay on a topic of your choice, relevant for sustainable business, finance and/or circular economy! The students writing the most topical and interesting essays, were offered the opportunity to receive guidance from the editors of Blogging for Sustainability towards publication. The first blog posts in our new student blog post series are already out: Check out ‘How green are green bonds really?’ by bachelor student Fabian Goudeau, and ‘Fly me to the moon – sustainably?’ by master student Christian Mattiat. More blog posts are on the way!
Blogging for Sustainability continues to welcome guest bloggers from around the world and at all stages of academia. Potential bloggers may find the guidance written for the student bloggers useful:
Write in an easily accessible way, with an interested reader of a blog as your imagined target group. Give your essay a short and interesting title. Draw in your reader from the first paragraph. Use an active tone and short sentences. Have short paragraphs. Add headings to break up the text. Make the headings interesting, giving the essence or posing a question. End with a paragraph that gives the reader something to take with them into their work, their studies, or their dinner conversation with family and friends.
Corporate Sustainability Law
The second new elective starts up in the spring term of 2024: Corporate Sustainability Law, also on both bachelor and master level. The course website is under preparation, and Beate shares with us how excited she is to be preparing also this second elective, grounded in her interdisciplinary conceptualisation that has given the name to the course: ‘Both electives go to the heart of the research that I have been doing over the last two decades, from the early years of my doctoral thesis and across the international research projects I have coordinated, notably the Sustainable Companies Project and the SMART Project. This second elective is based on the interdisciplinary concept of Corporate Sustainability Law, which is the theme I am working on right now, analysing the multi-layered regulatory framework that intends to promote corporate sustainability. Corporate sustainability is about the contribution of business to sustainability, which is necessary if we are going to be able achieve overarching sustainability goals in this decade of action towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.’
The elective positions the discussion of business in the unsustainable reality of our time, and analyses how business can create value in a sustainable way. Creating sustainable value is, amongst other things, contributing to the protection of human rights, ensuring decent work, and fair taxation. Sustainable value creation is also about contributing to mitigating climate change, reversing biodiversity loss, and phasing out novel entities such as microplastics.
‘We will discuss sectors such as the energy sector, the food industry, and the fashion industry, as concrete examples of the unsustainability of business as usual’, says Beate, adding that the core themes of the elective will be ‘corporate purpose, governance of the business (including of global value chains), and the evolving duties of the board’.
Inspiration from College of Europe
Beate is a Visiting Professor at College of Europe, where she teaches the elective ‘Ensuring Sustainability through EU Law’ as a part of the Master of European Law at the European Legal Studies Department. She shares with us how this has inspired the application for the new electives that now have started up in Oslo. And from the spring of 2024, also College of Europe students will have writing blog-style essays as part of their assessment in Beate’s seminar, with the offer of blog-style guidance given to the student authors of the most topical and interesting of the essays.