Co-Creating a Sustainability Textbook to Strengthen Interdisciplinary Management Education

As part of the Business School’s strategic commitment to sustainability, a key challenge was strengthening the integration of sustainability across teaching and curricula. While sustainability had been introduced in selected modules, it often remained confined to specialized courses rather than embedded throughout business education. Faculty members from disciplines such as accounting, marketing, strategy, finance, and human resources approached sustainability from different perspectives and with varying levels of engagement. Yet meaningful sustainability education requires these perspectives to complement one another and contribute to a shared understanding across disciplines.

To address this challenge, the Business School launched a participatory co-creation process to develop an interdisciplinary sustainability textbook for management education. Over a two-year period, around 20 faculty members from all institutes engaged in interdisciplinary workshops, peer-review processes, and iterative feedback loops. Together, they developed 20 interdisciplinary chapters integrating sustainability perspectives across business subjects while building a shared understanding of sustainability within the School.

The initiative resulted in an open-access sustainability textbook and strengthened interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration among faculty members. Participants developed a deeper appreciation of how disciplinary perspectives can contribute to a more holistic framework for management education and sustainability integration. The project also increased the visibility of sustainability within curriculum discussions and created a stronger foundation for embedding sustainability across programs.

To broaden institutional impact, the School is now planning “Deep Dive” courses to extend interdisciplinary sustainability capabilities across the wider faculty.

“Co-creating a sustainability textbook fundamentally changed how we discuss sustainability across disciplines and strengthened our shared approach to management education.” Ingrid Kissling-Näf, Dean , Bern University of Applied Sciences Business School