Abstract:

The societies confront major challenges and pressure to act more sustainably at all levels to preserve the natural resources and to slow down, or even reverse, the climate change. Regardless the necessity to act more responsibly and sustainably, we need to ensure opportunities to economic growth and prosperity. Here we do not contrast the goals of sustainability and growth, but instead look for possibilities to promote growth in a sustainable manner in the societies. We aim at being agnostic about growth and understand the dynamic complexity of economies, as introduced by Kate Raworth (2017). In the transition we need contributions from several, different sectors in our societies, but recent reports on corporate social responsibility show that the impact of companies as sustainable innovation accelerators is crucial. The role of consumers or individual action should not be neglected either.

Behavioral insights and choice architecture in particular offer an approach to influence human choice behavior, and the approach may provide means to promote sustainable behaviors in society. The approach is human centric. It is central to understand the motivations, aspirations, contextual influences and the limitations of rational judgment in choice behaviors by applying knowledge from behavioral economics and other relevant behavioral sciences. A nudge is a choice architectural intervention that aims to influence people's choice behavior in a predictable way, but it does not reduce or limit the possible courses of action, nor does it change the cost of choice alternatives. Instead, nudges leverage people’s inherent choice heuristics and biases. (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009) Green nudges are practical interventions that aim to direct consumer’s choice behaviors towards sustainable behaviors.

To advance the green transition, we need insights on how to create more sustainable business models as well as insights on how to lead the transition. With deeper consumer insight, means to promote behavioral change, and by understanding how consumers and companies can co-operate in the green transition, we want to empower students in search for resilient ways and good practices to enhance green transition.

In this paper, we adopt an educational approach by introducing an online 5 ECTS course that aims to increase the awareness of green transition and the capability of individuals for promoting sustainable behaviors both at personal and societal levels. Our goal is to increase interest in large audiences, and to motive students to learn more on the topic in the future. The course was introduced as a novel method in student admissions process to two Master in Business Administration programmes, which enabled us to reach large audiences for the introductory course. Our analysis of student feedback indicates a high interest in the topic among the students as well as preference towards the new qualification method in student admissions process. The students appreciate the possibility to learn already during the admissions process. We analyze our experiences and developmental work on an online student admissions course by applying the Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu).

Keywords:

Green transition, green nudge, behavioral insights, sustainable behavior, educational approach.