Is Sustainable Business an Oxymoron? Rethinking sustainability under capitalism on our new MSc programme

Cargo container ship, Thailand. Photo by Suphanat Khumsap.

QMUL’s new MSc Global Business and Sustainability draws on the collective expertise of the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production and the Department of Business and Society. To mark its launch, we examine why ‘sustainable business’ is proving such an elusive goal, and how this concept must be radically reimagined along lines of social, racial and climate justice for progressive transformation.

Next year marks the ten-year anniversary of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), leaving just five years for the global development community to make good on its ambition to meet the goals by 2030. Yet as the UN itself has reported, progress across the SDGs is “woefully off-track”, and 30% of the goals have stalled completely or now look worse than when they were launched. So why are the SDGs – the world’s biggest and most consolidated effort at sustainability to date – proving so difficult to achieve? What would it take for our economies and societies to really become sustainable? And how can students develop the knowledge and skills to become global leaders in this process?

““What would it take for our economies and societies to really become sustainable? And how can students develop the knowledge and skills to become global leaders in this process?””

These are the questions that our new MSc Global Business and Sustainability, launching in September 2025 in QMUL’s School of Business and Management, has been designed to answer. Our programme is grounded in the belief that to tackle the sustainability crisis, we need to understand that (un)sustainability is generated through diverse factors intersecting across the global economy. We also need to look at how the system that currently shapes the global economy – namely, capitalism – prevents change in those factors. While mitigating and adapting to climate change is of course central to sustainability, a broader view must also focus on inequality, racial justice, gender equity and human rights, and recognise how these themes cut through and reinforce the current climate crisis.

Pinheiros River, São Paulo city, Brazil. Photo by Isadora Cruxên.

Take, for example, global food systems, which are fast industrialising and dominated by corporations like Nestle, Unilever, Cargill and Syngenta, to name just a few. Researchers have estimated that industrialised food systems are the source of a staggering one third of global gas and carbon emissions, showing how the production, transportation and consumption of food depend on systems that are destroying our global natural environment. On our MSc programme, however, students will explore how these same processes depend on cheap labour in the Global South (for example, of women in horticultural supply chains), thus driving the reproduction of racial and gender inequalities, and how they also result in deterioration of local ecologies (for example, deforestation in the case of soy or relentless groundwater extraction in the case of rice). Our focus will be on designing comprehensive strategies for sustainability that address these intersections between corporate governance, social justice and ecological health, rather than addressing these elements in an isolated fashion.

The same need to address the intersections between aspects of sustainability emerges when we look at ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investing. Proponents have argued that if business investors make their financing conditional on corporations’ commitment to working towards social and ecological (as well as financial) ends, this will drive the transition to a sustainable economy without damaging corporate profit-making. New sustainable finance models, based on this idea, have generated excitement and optimism across the corporate sector. But in the recent explosion of green bonds, blended finance and impact investing, it has proved difficult to really deliver across the triple bottom line, and much of what has been hyped as sustainable finance has ended up looking a lot like business (or investment) as usual. Students on our MSc programme will learn about these models, but they will also explore why the different elements of ESG are proving so hard to combine, and study alternative models for social enterprise and investment.

Bridge asphalt road, Finland. Photo by nblx.

Across the corporate sector, and even as more companies commit to net zero emission targets and other sustainability goals, there is a growing realisation that we need to rethink existing strategies for both corporate sustainability and its financing. Our new programme provides students with a critical, interdisciplinary framework for this upcoming sustainability ‘rethink’. Reflecting the School’s vision for social justice and good governance, we focus on what actors in business, government and civil society can actually do to move the world towards a more sustainable future, while grappling with the social, economic, political and environmental trade-offs of different solutions.

At the core of the programme sit two Foundations modules. These will unpack the concept of sustainability, exploring the relationship(s) between markets, state, civil society and global development, and how visions of a sustainable future are framed differently among actors across these contexts. These modules draw on interdisciplinary theory from business studies, political economy, geography, anthropology and development studies, and explore different methodologies for applying this theory to a range of practical case studies. Further modules will examine how sustainability relates to economic globalisation and changes in international business over time, and how existing eco-business strategies are applied across global supply chains in foundational industries such as food, energy and transport.

In parallel, our module on global governance introduces the history of key institutions such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and different approaches in policymaking such as green growth, degrowth, the circular economy and Green New Deals. Two further modules examine the diverse risks posed by climate change to businesses, workers and the wider communities in which they sit, alongside strategies for risk mitigation and adaptation, and look critically at the potential of emerging sustainable finance instruments. Students will also carry out a dissertation project with the opportunity for independent research in a business, NGO or public sector organisation, exploring existing models and contributing to innovative future possibilities for business sustainability in practice.

The programme takes a global perspective across all modules, drawing on literature, learning materials and case studies from the Global South and North to explore context-specific challenges and strategies for sustainability. Students will hear directly from guest speakers around the world, in businesses and organisations including Friends of the Earth, EY, LUSH Cosmetics, B Lab, the Trade Justice Movement and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation. We have designed the programme to respond to growing calls for business schools to equip graduates with the knowledge, skills, networks and critical thinking necessary for employability in diverse corporate, public sector and non-profit sustainability roles. Above all, we hope students will leave us inspired and prepared to make sure that sustainable business is no longer an oxymoron in their future careers.  

Find out more about our new MSc Global Business and Sustainability and how to apply here.