Sustainability Research (SRI) PhD Projects

Towards more holistic organisational sustainability reporting

Supervisor: Dr Rodrigo Lozano

Increasingly, organisations (such as universities and companies) are preparing and publishing sustainability reports. This is evidenced by the adoption of several guidelines, such as the ISO 14000 series, the Social Accountability 8000 standard, and the GRI Sustainability Guidelines. SR shows promise to help corporate leaders and their employees to contribute towards achieving sustainable societies. However, most of the guidelines and standards address sustainability issues through comparmentalisation, thereby, leading to the separation of the economic, environmental, and social dimensions. Additionally, the quality of the SR disclosures has yet to translate into meaningful and comprehensive SRs. The key questions to explore include:  How can organisations better recognise and report inter-linking issues? How can they better learn from the reporting process? How can they incorporate the reports into their efforts as learning organisations and better align their systems with sustainability? Candidates are invited for proposals answering these research questions or related areas