Syllabus overview (public)

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Programme Master in Management
Academic Year Academic Year 2025/2026
Module/course Code BF03
Delivery location Paris
Language English
Course type Elective courses 15h
Contact hours 15
ECTS 2
Semester Spring
Module name Value-based sustainability assessment of firms
Field (Discipline) Sustainable Development, CSR and Ethics

Outline


Module/course Summary

The course introduces students to the value-based assessment of (corporate) sustainability performance. The course is very much hands-on. By using corporate sustainability information students learn about corporate sustainability reporting and accounting at the same time. The course mimicks a consultancy project (similar analyses have been conducted with corporate partners such as BASF, BMW, and Airbus).

Companies increasingly report on their environmental performance. Very little is done with this information today. During this course, students will learn how to work with information that is derived from financial, environmental, and social accounting reports and systems. By working with this information, students will not only learn how to analyse (corporate) sustainability performance based on tangible information but also how to provide information that is useful to decision-makers and, in particular, how to benchmark the sustainability performance of a company. Hands-on working with this information will also show to which degree this information is reliable today and highlight elementary decisions that need to be taken when environmental and social information is reported and used.

The approach used in this course measures and interprets corporate sustainability performance analogously to financial performance, i.e. using the concept of opportunity costs. This sets the approach apart from existing burden-based approaches. Students learn how to apply value-based thinking that finance and large parts of management are based on to (corporate) sustainability, which is dominated by burden-based approaches.