June 2 (14:00- 15:30 - Plenary Hall A7, next to the CROUS Restaurant) Cooperating and Managing for Sustainable Development
In the run up to Paris COP21 in December 2015, several voluntary new corporate initiatives were announced to address climate change. COP21 itself relies primarily on voluntary national targets with only normative pressures for compliance. This panel will focus on the adequacy of existing CSR-style voluntary governance mechanisms and ‘deliberative democratic’ processes to address climate change and sustainable development more broadly. Cooperative governance mechanisms that engage multiple stakeholders are often set within profound asymmetric power relations and interests: Large businesses and Western industrialized countries tend to have greater influence, while the voices of labour, women, countries of the global South, and other interests represented by civil society organizations are often marginalized. Similarly, our approach to sustainable consumption currently appears to depend on business-led voluntary “sharing economy” platforms such as Uber and AirBnB.
Our panel will examine the challenges and possibilities of collaborative governance mechanisms to address the social, environmental and economic dimensions of sustainable development, and their relevance for different issues and national contexts.
Moderator/ Panellist: David L. Levy (University of Massachusetts, US)
David L. Levy is Professor of Management in the College of Management at UMass-Boston. David is Director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness, whose mission is “to foster a transition to a clean, sustainable, and prosperous economy”.
Panellists:
Steffen Böhm(University of Exeter, UK)
Steffen Böhm is Professor in Organisation & Sustainability and Director of the Sustainability & Circular Economy Research Cluster at University of Exeter Business School. He is focussing on the political economies and ecologies of the sustainability nexus;
Dima Jamali (American University of Beirut, Lebanon/ University of Southampton, UK)
Dima Jamali is Professor of Management and Kamal Shair Endowed Chair in Responsible Leadership in the Olayan School of Business, American University of Beirut. Her research and teaching revolve primarily around Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship.