Sustainability Ethics and Financial Capi

The World Bank has estimated that the global cost of corruption is at least $2.6 trillion, or 5% of the global gross domestic product (GDP). Businesses and individuals pay over $1 trillion in bribes annually, which does not account for billions of dollars of both humanitarian and development aid that pass clandestinely from public to private hands, billions lost to tax evasion, and billions funneled to and from illegal trafficking. In addition, it does not account for billions enmeshed in conflicts of interest, ranging from campaign donations to regulatory loopholes and in general, “private gain from public office”. All such transactions occur in globally widespread arenas of corrupt practices. In this money-based environment, “what is just” in the distribution of programmatic goods and services needs continually to be determined, and depends upon whose participation will be allowed, counted and verified in decision processes. Some voices are heard, others are unheard, and the difference often depends upon the existing distribution of wealth, including the access wealth facilitates to these processes.

In this complex situation, which results significantly from unethical practices, the process and success of sustainability, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), depend upon the positive inroads and disruptions made by ethical practices. What are the features of these practices? What kinds of ethics are necessary and integral to the process and success of sustainability? Many new practical ethics, framed by scholars and practitioners since the 1980s, are promoted today by individuals and organizations, including national and international governmental organizations, civil society organizations (CSOs, also called NGOs), corporations, and even loosely structured grassroots movements. In what forms and at what levels of sustainability management are the new ethics to be adopted and pursued? This course seeks to identify, explain and consider such “sustainability ethics” and the ways in which sustainability managers can activate them, largely through issue-framing, agenda-setting, and policy, program and project design, inspection and review.

The course material is divided into three sections: challenges, pathways and practices. Challenges include the worldwide dimensions of ethical problems today; and the three particular problems of corruption, conflict and climate, which undercut economy, society and ec