This course invites students to be part of the rapidly evolving world of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability. This increasingly influential discipline is rapidly becoming a central challenge for most companies, all over the world. Businesspeople, consultants, and public policy leaders need nowadays to become familiar, indeed proficient about the main topics of CSR and Sustainability.

Throughout this course, we focus particularly on:

• Measurement and control of Sustainability—how emerging appraisal tools capture the diverse attributes of CSR. We also discuss issues related to rating agencies, ESG (Environment/Social/ Governance) analysis and performance.
• Corporate social reporting, responsibility and accountability in the context of sustainable development, considering the tensions between theory and practice, and between financial performance and sustainability.

We put particular emphasis on the company’s relation with its stakeholders, and we also attempt to bring an international perspective. Instruction techniques will include interactive lectures, class discussions, presentations, simulations and case studies. The course adopts a largely interactive style as lectures are designed to open a dialogue between the instructor and the students.

I do hope that this course may help students become better prepared to address the arguably most important challenge of their generation.