This paper explores the integration of indicators that reflect the concepts of sustainability into business cases and business case evaluation methods. It is based on the observations that sustainability is one of the most important challenges of our time and that sustainable development requires change of the way we use resources, produce products, share our wealth, and so on. And as change is inescapably related to innovation and projects, sustainable development is related to projects. Business cases of projects should therefore reflect this relationship and include criteria for the assessment of sustainability aspects. Based on an identification of business case evaluation methods, and an overview of frameworks for sustainability indicators, an analysis is made of the inclusion of the indicators and principles of sustainability in business cases and business case evaluation methods. The analysis will conclude that the integration sustainability considerations into business cases of projects, is more than a set of additional criteria to be considered. Integration of sustainability considerations suggests a more holistic and elaborated perspective on business case evaluation than the Return on Investment question, that is dominating business cases and business case evaluation today.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between sustainable performance and risk management, whereby sustainability (innovation), interdisciplinarity and leadership give new insights into the traditional perspectives on performance and risk management in the field of accounting and finance.
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EuroSonic NoorderSlag (ESNS) actively engages with around 130 festivals across Europe as part of the ESNS Exchange program. As a leading partner in this initiative, ESNS aims to transition into a fully sustainable festival in the coming years. It recognizes its role in spearheading the sustainability aspect of the ESNS Exchange and the industry at large. However, the current lack of information regarding the industry's sustainability practices poses a challenge, leaving ESNS uncertain about the necessary steps to improve the market as a whole. The NHL Stenden Professorship Transformational Media, ESNS and the minor Music Management are collaborating on a joint project to address this issue. The project aims to assess the current state of sustainable practices in European Music Festivals and analyse how these festivals communicate their initiatives. Additionally, students in the Music minor program will create and test a prototype to encourage festivals to communicate about their sustainability activities.
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Teachers have a crucial role in bringing about the extensive social changes that are needed in the building of a sustainable future. In the EduSTA project, we focus on sustainability competences of teachers. We strengthen the European dimension of teacher education via Digital Open Badges as means of performing, acknowledging, documenting, and transferring the competencies as micro-credentials. EduSTA starts by mapping the contextual possibilities and restrictions for transformative learning on sustainability and by operationalising skills. The development of competence-based learning modules and open digital badge-driven pathways will proceed hand in hand and will be realised as learning modules in the partnering Higher Education Institutes and badge applications open for all teachers in Europe.Societal Issue: Teachers’ capabilities to act as active facilitators of change in the ecological transition and to educate citizens and workforce to meet the future challenges is key to a profound transformation in the green transition.Teachers’ sustainability competences have been researched widely, but a gap remains between research and the teachers’ practise. There is a need to operationalise sustainability competences: to describe direct links with everyday tasks, such as curriculum development, pedagogical design, and assessment. This need calls for an urgent operationalisation of educators’ sustainability competences – to support the goals with sustainability actions and to transfer this understanding to their students.Benefit to society: EduSTA builds a community, “Academy of Educators for Sustainable Future”, and creates open digital badge-driven learning pathways for teachers’ sustainability competences supported by multimodal learning modules. The aim is to achieve close cooperation with training schools to actively engage in-service teachers.Our consortium is a catalyst for leading and empowering profound change in the present and for the future to educate teachers ready to meet the challenges and act as active change agents for sustainable future. Emphasizing teachers’ essential role as a part of the green transition also adds to the attractiveness of teachers’ work.
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has the ambition to activate learners to engage in societal issues by exploring shifting perspectives on ourselves and our complex world. Educators across University of Applied Sciences (UAS) in the Netherlands are working hard to bring this ambition to life by implementing innovative pedagogies that emphasise transformative learning and empower students to take action to ignite societal transitions. However, both literature and practise have yet to establish educational assessment practise suited to ESD ambitions. This Comenius Teaching Fellow project proposes an innovation in the practise of sustainability education by developing an assessment format crucial to the constructive alignment in ESD. Assessment formats will be prototyped within the transformative course Creating Impact at Breda University of Applied Sciences resulting in two main products: (1) innovative assessment format for Creating Impact, including Implementation Toolkit and (2) a generic Design Toolkit ESD Assessment. The products are directly developed for the outlined context, but contribute to the increased capacity of UAS educators more broadly to embed ESD in educational practise. Future educational forms addressing societal challenges must take into account all aspects of educational design, including assessment, to ensure constructive alignment. By focusing on assessment in ESD, the outcomes of this project are an essential contribution to bridging the gap between ESD theory and educational practice, so that, in the words of the Vereniging Hogescholen, we educate our students to become professionals who help build a new, sustainable society
Client: European Commission (DG-Enterprise), subcontracted through Comunitá Montana Associazione dei Comuni Trasimeno-Medio Tevere SLOW TOUR (Sustainable Lake Oriented Walking Tourism) is a project funded by the European Commission's DG Enterprise and Industry within the Programme Competiveness and Innovation Framework (CIP) under the call “Knowledge Networks for the competitiveness and sustainability of European tourism”.SLOW TOUR's goal is to make tourism on and around European lakes more sustainable and competitive. To achieve this, best-practices, certifications and networks in lake tourism were gathered and analysed within a coherent framework, leading to a “Manual of Excellence of Lake tourism in Europe” as its main product. CSTT's contribution was mainly focused on a Sustainability Impact Assessment of a number of European lake destinations, and the development of indicators and benchmarks for sustainable tourism products in lake areas.For SLOW TOUR, the NHTV Centre for Sustainable Tourism and Transport was subcontracted through Comunitá Montana Associazione dei Comuni Trasimeno - Medio Tevere (Italy). The other parties are Global Nature FUND, representing the Living Lakes network, and the University of Perugia. The project ran from June 2010 to November 2011.
