Sustainable Business and the Environment

This 2-credit seminar provides an introduction to the roles that private organizations, including nongovernmental organizations, corporations, lenders, investors, and others are playing in reducing environmental pollution and managing natural resources. Private environmental governance initiatives utilize many regulatory instruments that parallel the instruments used by public environmental governance, such as regulatory standards, market mechanisms and information disclosure requirements. Business managers must think about their firms’ interactions with the environment. Goals of this course include learning to think critically about: (1) the relationship between business and the natural environment (e.g., the desire to achieve business sustainability), (2) the existing legal and policy framework of environmental protection and its effects on what business managers are charged and able to do, and (3) the intersection between private environmental governance and public regulation. Relying on expert scholars and business leaders, the course will introduce you to sustainability topics as they relate to different business and legal concepts. Topics include the drive towards impact valuation; how informational regulation affects business strategy; the emerging concepts of private environmental governance, in which private contracting, third-party certification, and insurance can impose environmental obligations and create incentives in the absence of government action; different approaches of incorporating sustainability into business practices, including through life-cycle analysis and environmental management systems; and the legal issues surrounding the use of trade and taxation measures to achieve climate change mitigation.