2025 PRME Education Award

The work done in the past years has aimed at creating a deep-lasting change in how management schools systemically integrate the SDG’s and sustainability into all their activities. Our role as a management education is not only to teach our students about sustainability, but also embody what sustainability means at a whole-institution level. Students should experience sustainability in all interactions and experiences they have while studying at our institutions, and this has been the main focus of my work at IESEG in the past 8 years.

Advancing responsible management education and the SDG’s thus requires a 360 approach that strongly integrates sustainability into the culture of the institution, and that then spreads through our teaching, our research, our operations, and our student and staff engagement. One of the key actions has been to ensure that everyone at IESEG- so not only students- has the same level of understanding and knowledge around sustainability. Beyond reviewing all course and program content to ensure sustainability is well integrated through all disciplines, and increasing the number of mandatory ECTS on sustainability for our students, we also trained all our professors and administrative staff to ensure sustainability is at the root of all our activities. Additionally, all academic departments and administrative staff created roadmaps with clear objectives for the integration of sustainability in the next years. These roadmaps were presented to our board of directors in March 2025.

Also, IESEG has taken action and commitments in some specific SDG’s such as through the publication of our Climate Action Plan (SDG13) including an international mobility plan, through our Gender Equality Plan (SDG 5), the launch of a program for long-term unemployed women in collaboration with a large cosmetics multinational and a French NGO (SDG 4,8, and 10), the launch ‘Teale’ -a mental health platform for our students (SDG 3), and our partnership with institutions such as B Lab France and the GRI (SDG 17).

Advancing responsible management education also requires institutions to further professionalize the way we monitor progress and that we communicate. Establishing clear objectives and KPI’s at the School level, and implementing a dashboard to help monitor and communicate has been an important step in that direction at IESEG.

This process now allows us to move from just storytelling to a -still perfectible- data monitoring that provides us with a more objective view of our impact and our progress. Additionally, this allows us to communicate our progress every year more transparently to our stakeholders through our Impact Report.

Finally, working in partnership with other institutions both from academia and outside academia has been crucial. Collaborating with companies, NGO’s, startups, and other higher education institutions is the best way to learn from each other and to multiply our impact.

Through our Transition 2026 program we were able to review all courses and programs to map existing sustainability competences, identify gaps and rethink what the ideal student sustainability journey would be in terms of knowledge, skills, and competences. Existing frameworks such as the SDGs and the EU Greemcomp were at the heart of the process. Doing this exercise allowed us to review and redesign some of our courses to ensure students are getting the required skills. For example, we went from having one mandatory sustainability course and one mandatory project in our 5-year program in 2020, to having a real student sustainability journey with 1 mandatory sustainability introduction seminar, 3 mandatory courses, and 2 mandatory interdisciplinary projects. Having more ECTS to be attributed to sustainability allowed us to go much deeper in the way we integrate climate change and biodiversity for example into our courses. As an example, all students now follow a course during their second year on Environmental and Energy Economics. Also, all our Grande Ecole students take the TASK (Sulitest) evaluation. Finally, sustainability has been integrated through all disciplines, including Majors and Minors; and students can choose electives on this topic such as the Climate Lab or sustainability and film courses.

In addition, it has been very important for us to provide students the opportunity to put in practice the knowledge and competences acquired in the classroom. This has been done through different means: concrete interdisciplinary projects where students work with companies, associations, or cities on a sustainability challenge for a full semester; through the organization of hands-on workshops and seminars in our Impact Corner’s; through voluntary engagement in sustainability such as our Responsible Leaders program; and through our student association body that now includes a sustainability leader for each association.

To promote student engagement in sustainability, and thus promote the application and acquisition of skills, we launched the Sustainability Certificate in 2022. This certificate rewards students who engage in different ways in sustainability, apply their acquired sustainability skills in practical ways, and learn new skills through different experiences. Students get points for taking electives on sustainability, for attending events and conferences, for being part of an association working for sustainability, for completing a sustainability-related internship, and for writing their student thesis on sustainability.

A key learning from this process is to not see responsible management education as only about teaching and research, and separated from the more operational side and activities. Advancing responsible management education requires all those parts of the institution to collaborate, to set common goals, and to ensure coherence and alignment between the different activities of the School. In our case, we initially wanted to make sure that we deep-dived into the academic side, reviewing course and program content. And as we started that process, we realized this could not be disconnected from the rest of our activities, and that we wanted to be aligned between what we taught our students and what we practiced as an organization. Doing so required getting people onboard and strengthening sustainability as part of the culture and the strategy of IESEG. This is when the need for a school-wide training appeared, including the need to finalize this training with the elaboration of service roadmaps to promote empowerment and accountability from all teams. Ensuring we all have the same understanding, the same language, and the same vision on where we want to go.

This school-wide process also required getting some leaders and influencers from different parts of the organization to help drive change. Creating a solid group of people working together to drive change can be very powerful and can help accelerate the process. A few professors, a few members of our staff, a few students, and a few alumni have all been part of this process through the past 5 years.