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.

Climate change, drastic biodiversity decline, poverty, hunger, inequality, mass migration: these are only some examples of the sustainability challenges our world is facing at the moment. To move ahead on the path towards sustainability, we all have to act together and rethink the ways we think, create and interact as a society. Sustainable development is at the core of oikos’ purpose – and more specifically the sustainable development and transformation of the higher education system. We see a need to change how we understand, teach, learn and use economics and management for the good of people and the planet. Aiming to contribute to this transformation, a critical question that needs to be asked is: how do we define sustainability and inspire tangible, strategic action that shifts our unsustainable course? Here’s our sustainability definition with more background information.