Activities & output

This Expert Meeting is aimed at mapping out the challenges that keep business enterprises and other stakeholders from mainstreaming the people-part of sustainable business, and reflecting on possible ways forward. The Expert Meeting will be a closed session – held under Chatham House Rule – involving a selected audience of experts from the business community, but also some experts from government, sustainability initiatives, and the Erasmus University Departments of Law and Business Management.

The book, which is edited by Prof. Liesbeth Enneking, Prof. Martijn Scheltema and Dr. Ilja Tillema, contains highly original contributions by seven excellent Master students on the role that the field of private law may plain in preventing and redressing corporate violations of human rights and the environment in global value chains.

Read the article ‘De studenten kwamen met onverwachte invalshoeken en verfrissende ideeën’ (in Dutch)

At the first day of the conference, which brought together leaders from the worlds of business, government, NGOs and academia to discuss the transition towards more responsive and responsible leadership, Prof. Cees van Dam and Prof. Liesbeth Enneking have lead a break-out session on ‘Corporate Responsibility and Human Rights’. At the second day of the conference, which was more academic in nature, Prof. Martijn Scheltema and Prof. Rob van Tulder featured in parallel sessions on ‘Regulating Responsibility’ and on ‘Responsible Financial Markets’, respectively.

The book contains contributions of more than 80 alumni and of B-SM staff, including ‘Developing the Societal Dimension of a Business School’ (by Muel Kaptein, Lucas Meijs, Rob van Tulder) and ‘Mainstreaming Human Rights in Sustainable Business’ (by Cees van Dam & Heleen Tiemersma)

The workshop’s outcomes were reported to the Sustainable Market Actors for Responsible Trade (SMART) project, an EU-funded project involving academic research that promotes sustainable development within the planetary boundaries. The organizing committee joined Prof. Liesbeth Enneking and Prof. Martijn Scheltema (both Erasmus School of Law, Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity) with Dr. Jeroen Veldman (Cass Business School, SMART project). They will also be the guest editors of a special issue of the Erasmus Law Review, to be published in December 2019, which will report on the workshop’s main findings in more detail.