The 2024-25 HBA Sustainability Certificate, co-led by Professors Oana Branzei and Diane-Laure Arjaliès, promises an exciting array of new courses, partnerships, and opportunities for students.
A Legacy of Impact
For 14 years, the HBA Sustainability Certificate has been a keystone feature of the Ivey undergraduate experience. Professor Oana Branzei, who has directed the program since its inception, has guided nearly 400 graduates through this transformative journey.
Discover the HBA Sustainability Certificate Program
This Year’s Thought-Provoking Theme
This year, Professors Branzei and Arjaliès pose the compelling question...
"Can capitalism be regenerative?”
Perhaps the answer is too easy: “Not yet”. But if we want it to be, what role could you play? Through innovative courses, activities and pedagogies, we will collectively strive towards regeneration in design, economies, futures, and leadership.
You are invited to contribute your skepticism, critique, anxiety, and/or ambitions to making capitalism less degenerative and more regenerative. Feel free to join the dialogue by adding your reactions and comments below the theme reveal video.
New Courses and Electives
This year, the program introduces two options for the compulsory course: Impact Assessment and Social Enterprise. Students keen to take both will be pleased to know that one can count as the required course, while the other can be an elective.
In addition to staple electives like Technology and Humanity, Reputation Management and Systems Thinking in an Age of Disruption, we’ve added TRC-In-Action, scheduled for August 2024.
Beyond the Classroom: Extracurricular Engagements
Students will also participate in five key extracurricular experiences designed to foster change-making leadership:
- Mentorship: Students will begin their ‘journey to purpose’ with guidance from HBA Sustainability Certificate fellows and inspiring Ivey alumni who will help them design and realize their career aspirations.
- Live Case: They will respond rapidly to real-time dilemmas presented by the executive team of a major company.
- Field Trip: Students will engage in hands-on activities with leaders and organizations during on-site visits.
- Worldchangers: They will attend a showcase of "Sustainability by Ivey," featuring alumni who have launched sustainable startups or lead sustainability strategies.
- Journey to Purpose: They will conclude the year with a keynote presentation, unveiling of purpose statements by the graduating cohort, and networking opportunities with Ivey faculty, alumni, and the incoming certificate cohort.
Meet the program Co-directors
About Oana Branzei
Oana Branzei is the Paul MacPherson Chair in Strategic Leadership and Professor of Strategy and Sustainability at the Ivey Business School at Western University in Canada. She is also the founding Director of the HBA Sustainability Certificate program and the Master of Science Graduate Diploma in Sustainability; the founder, convener and host of PhD Sustainability Academy, an annual event of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability; and co-founder of the recently inaugurated virtual-based and accessible Spring Institute. Ivey’s champion for the United Nation’s Principles for Responsible Education for a decade (until 2019), Oana has since pioneered the ESG and SDG case curations and global conversations for Ivey Publishing. Oana heads her global Resilience lab, originally formed with funding from her 2010 Early Researcher Award, and currently featuring collaborations with rapid-response research teams tackling grand challenges on five continents.
Professor Branzei, a Western Faculty Scholar (2018-2020) currently cross-appointed with Western University’s Centre for Climate Change, Sustainable Livelihoods and Health, vice chairs the Western University Research Board, represents Ivey on Western’s Senate, is an Advisory Board member for the Africa Institute, and sits on the Steering Committee for Western’s Carbon Solutions Fund. Oana served as adjudicator for the Ontario COVID-19 Rapid Research Fund and has chaired the Social Sciences Panel for the Early Researcher Awards for Ontario’s Ministry of Innovation since 2018.
About Diane-Laure Arjaliès
Diane-Laure Arjaliès is an Associate Professor (with tenure) belonging to the ‘Sustainability,’ ‘Managerial Accounting and Control,’ and ‘General Management’ groups at the Ivey Business School – a cross-disciplinary appointment that reflects her research and teaching. She aims to push the boundaries of knowledge and practice by investigating how fashioning new devices and collective actions can help transform financial markets towards sustainability. Over the years, she has studied the emergence of responsible investing, impact assessment, integrated reporting, and alternative currencies. Her work in this area has won her several academic, teaching, and professional prizes.
She founded and leds the Sustainable Finance Lab at the Centre for Building Sustainable Value. She is currently working on an extensive research program on conservation finance, aiming to channel capital towards protecting ecosystems, notably through conservation impact bonds. As an ethnographer, she enjoys doing field research and sharing her experience with students and practitioners. She has published her work with Oxford University Press in Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped, and in major academic journals across various disciplines.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, she initiated and led an interdisciplinary, multimedia, and multilingual project, Breaking Boundaries, to offer a lasting record of collective and individual experiences during the lockdown and its aftermath. This book contributes to establishing the accounting discipline’s role in recording critical moments in our global history.