About the Centre for Research Into Sustainability
CRIS is an initiative of the School of Management and the Department of Geography at RHUL to provide focus to the College's growing involvement in the sustainability and corporate social responsibility agendas. These strongly overlapping agendas attempt to breathe operational life into the famous report of the Brundtland Committee aiming to support policies that "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" and involve activity in following fields:
- Protection of the global environment
- Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
- Social progress recognising the needs of all groups of society
At the core of the Centre's research philosophy is the idea that sustainability is a goal for economic, social, political and environmental actors in society which can only be studied in an interdisciplinary perspective. This interdisciplinary perspective is implemented in a joint cooperation between departments linked to those academic disciplines which have the most longstanding legacy of scholarship in sustainable development.
CRIS wants to make an impact at various levels through the following activities:
- Teaching programmes and courses directed, run or organized by members of CRIS for students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Our approach is not only to offer stand-alone teaching for students with special interests in sustainability, but we also have a mission to put mainstream sustainability into the curricula of our respective departments.
- The Centre's research, which focuses on the problem of creating sustainable societies – in particular sustainable organizations and sustainable eco-systems. As such our research is interdisciplinary, straddling not only the disciplines of management/business studies and geography, but also a range of other fields of academic inquiry, such as law, political science, economics, sociology and geology.
- The consulting services of CRIS, which are a result of our dedication to make an impact in the real world and produce outcomes and results for practitioners of sustainability. As such we collaborate with companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations in order to transform organizational practices towards the goal of greater sustainability.
