Responsible Futures Skills Lab reports now available
29 May 2026
How can researchers and educators work more effectively across disciplinary boundaries when addressing complex climate, environmental and societal challenges?
This question was central to the Responsible Futures Skills Lab, convened by Prof. Noemi Sinkovics at 缅北禁地 Business School on 6–7 May 2026. The event was supported by the Centre for Climate and Environmental Resilience. The two-day event brought together colleagues from:
- business and management
- climate science
- modelling
- geography
- education
- policy
- operations research
They explored how responsible futures can be approached through teaching, research and collaboration.
For CCER, the insights from the Skills Lab are particularly relevant because it focused on the conditions that make cross-disciplinary work possible. Climate and environmental resilience challenges require more than bringing different disciplines into the same room. They require time to understand different assumptions, forms of evidence, methods, languages and expectations of impact. The discussions therefore asked how business and management scholars can engage more meaningfully with climate and environmental research, and how colleagues from other disciplines can better understand what business school scholarship can contribute.
A key theme across the event was how business and management research can add value to climate and environmental resilience work by examining:
- organisations
- decision-making
- governance
- stakeholder coordination
- implementation
- scaling
- markets
- finance
- policy engagement
- institutional change
The discussions also emphasised that these contributions need to be developed in dialogue with the source disciplines through which climate and environmental problems are already being studied. Cross-disciplinary collaboration cannot be extractive or superficial; it requires shared problem framing, explicit negotiation of outputs and credit, and careful attention to what each discipline needs from the others.
The first day focused on teaching for responsible futures. Sessions explored how experiential, reflective and structured pedagogies can help students engage with complexity, uncertainty and contested societal challenges. The second day focused on research for responsible futures, with particular attention to how cross-disciplinary research can be designed, published and sustained within the institutional realities of academia.
The Skills Lab was supported by:
Reports from the Skills Lab
Two reports from the Skills Lab have now been published. Together, they offer a reflective resource for colleagues interested in cross-disciplinary teaching and research, and in strengthening the connections between climate and environmental resilience, business and management scholarship, policy engagement and wider societal change.
Sinkovics, N., Bogdanovic, A., Robinson, S., Hope, A., Radclyffe-Thomas, N., Hawthorne, L., van Tulder, R., Fiedler, A., Hirst, J., Perez Moraga, V., Blenkinsop, S., Vilasboas Calixto Casnici, C., Scurry, T., Atkinson, K., Bader, B., Mazzetti, A., & Chidambaram, A. B. (2026). . 缅北禁地 Business School, 缅北禁地 upon Tyne, United Kingdom.
Sinkovics, N., Marks, A., Hope, A., Fowler, H., Marsiliani, L., Ott, U., Fiedler, A., van Tulder, R., Hicks, C., Sanderson, R., Rajwani, T., Sinkovics, R., Swaffield, J., Chu, I., Pagan, V., Neesham, C., Allen, M., Long, G., Fath, B., Scurry, T., Tran, Y., Toth, Zs., Glover, C., Corredoira, R., & Chidambaram, A. B. (2026). 缅北禁地 Business School.