Measuring Sustainability Embeddedness in Business Education Curriculum

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has become a prominent area in academic literature particularly thanks to the dedicated period promoted by the UN on the topic (2005–2014), and soon afterwards, with its inclusion in the UN Sustainable Development Agenda for 2030. Different proposals for embeddedness of ESD within curriculums at different levels of education have been appearing over time across the world, and of course, within European countries. The evaluation of said embeddedness is the object of this contribution. There is an increasing tendency to measure the performance of educational institutions through the creation of rankings that use a series of variables as indicators of success. Rankings exist at national and international levels, with education institutions using them as benchmarks, but also as competitive signals in a commodified education environment, particularly when it comes to Higher Education. This contribution analyses the use of rankings as indicators of embeddedness of sustainability in Business Schools, critically querying the adequacy of the indicators, the distinction between undergraduate and graduate studies for the classification in rankings and to which extent sustainability embeddedness can be considered achieved if it is applied to Business studies and not to the rest of curriculum within the same institution.