How We Got Here

Inspiring the world for over 3 decades: A sneak peak into oikos’ origin & history

What has remained at the core of oikos is our ambition to work with people in collaborative ways (you could call that whole-person learning, participatory or service learning, amongst others), and the perception of higher education as a fundamental puzzle piece for addressing the global sustainability challenges.

One question we keep asking ourselves, and that deserves continuous reflection and consideration is: Why the focus on economics and management education? Why not only sustainability? Whenever an oikee raises this question, we surely can point back to our origins, where oikos was founded with an attempt to rejoin ecology and economy for the good of people and planet. After years of acting and thinking, our understanding of sustainability is broader (see here). And we don't want to attach to this focus just because of history. Yet, from a perspective of our identity and the leverage point economics and management & economics provide, this is where we can have a lot of impact, especially considering the transdisciplinarity, openness, and creativity our colorful community brings in. For oikos and many others, economics and management are two fields at the core of the needed transformations - and in particular the education in these fields. This is where we, on a higher level, aim to help shift the basic mode of operation onto a sustainable path - and thus stabilize our ecological and social systems.

Explore more on our history webpage & find out more about our history-related initiatives.