According to the critics of conventional sustainability models, particularly within the business context, it is questionable whether the objective of balancing the social, economic and environmental triad is feasible, and whether human equality and prosperity (as well as population growth) can be achieved with the present rate of natural degradation (Rees 2009). The current scale of human economic activity on Earth is already excessive; finding itself in a state of unsustainable ‘overshoot’ where consumption and dissipation of energy and material resources exceed the regenerative and assimilative capacity of supportive ecosystems (Rees 2012). Conceptualizing the current ‘politics of unsustainability’, reflected in mainstream sustainability debates, Blühdorn (2011) explores the paradox of wanting to ‘sustain the unsustainable, noting that the socio-cultural norms underpinning unsustainability support denial of the gravity of our planetary crises. This denial concerns anything from the imminence of mass extinctions to climate change. As Foster (2014) has phrased it: ‘There was a brief window of opportunity when the sustainability agenda might, at least in principle, have averted it’. That agenda, however, has failed. Not might fail, nor even is likely to fail – but has already failed. Yet, instead of acknowledging this failure and moving on from the realization of the catastrophe to the required radical measures, the optimists of sustainable development and ecological modernization continue to celebrate the purported ‘balance' between people, profit and planet. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "A Future Beyond Growth: Towards a Steady State Economy" on 4/14/16 ,available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315667515 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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Sustainable consumption is interlinked with sustainable production. This chapter will introduce the closed-loop production, the circular economy, the steady state economy, and Cradle to Cradle (C2C) models of production. It will reflect on the key blockages to a meaningful sustainable production and how these could be overcome, particularly in the context of business education. The case study of the course for bachelor’s students within International Business Management Studies (IBMS) program at three Universities of Applied Science (vocational schools), and at Leiden University College in The Netherlands will be discussed. Student teams from these schools were given the assignment to make a business plan for a selected sponsor company in order to advise them how to make a transition from a linear to circular economy model. These case studies will illustrate the opportunities as well as potential pitfalls of the closed loop production models. The results of case studies’ analysis show that there was a mismatch between expectations of the sponsor companies and those of students on the one hand and a mismatch between theory and practice on the other hand. The former mismatch is explained by the fact that the sponsor companies have experienced a number of practical constraints when confronted with the need for the radical overhaul of established practices within the entire supply chain and students have rarely considered the financial viability of the "ideal scenarios" of linear-circular transitions. The latter mismatch applies to what students had learned about macro-economic theory and the application through micro-economic scenarios in small companies. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319656076 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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This chapter will introduce the circular economy (CE) and Cradle to Cradle (C2C) models of sustainable production. It will reflect on the key blockages to a meaningful sustainable production and how these could be overcome, particularly in the context of business education. The case study of the course for bachelor’s students within International Business Management Studies (IBMS), and at University College in The Netherlands will be discussed. These case studies will illustrate the opportunities as well as potential pitfalls of the closed loop production models. The results of case studies’ analysis show that there was a mismatch between expectations of the sponsor companies and those of students on the one hand and a mismatch between theory and practice on the other hand. Helpful directions for future research and teaching practice are outlined. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319713113#aboutBook https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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