Sustainability, and particularly the dimensions of sustainability of concern to businesspeople, form the basis of this chapter. This conversation hones in on climate change, the greatest threat facing the planet today. It also assesses barriers to achieving common goals, new growth paradigms, and the responsibilities of businesspeople and politicians.
In his analysis, Bülent Eczacıbaşı draws attention to threats facing the world’s future as well as to hopeful developments. In addition to exploring the fundamental causes of sustainability problems, he examines both the responsibilities created by sustainability and the opportunities it offers business.
An economist with a BA and MA from Boğaziçi University and a PhD from Manchester University, Fikret Adaman is currently professor of Economics at Boğaziçi University. His fields of interest include ecological politics, public finance, history of economic thought, and Turkey’s political economy. His work has appeared in, among others, Antipode, The Cambridge Journal of Economics, Conservation Letters, Development and Change, Ecological Economics, Energy Policy, Environmental Politics, The New Left Review and Voluntas.
Adaman’s latest publication was the co-edited Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents. He has served as an expert to the European Commission on Turkey’s social policies since 2009 and was appointed in 2016 to lead Turkey’s branch of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
After receiving a BA from Boğaziçi University and an MA from McGill University, Hande Paker went on to complete her PhD, also at McGill, and currently teaches in the Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences at Bahçeşehir University. Her research interests include political sociology, political ecology, civil society, the state, citizenship, and politics of the environment. She has carried out research on modes of civil society-state relations, politics of the environment at the local-global nexus, and grounded cosmopolitan citizenship, with a particular focus on environmental struggles and women’s rights. Her articles have appeared in Environmental Politics, Theory and Society and Middle Eastern Studies. Her current research project analyzes how environmental civil society actors engage the issue of climate change and climate justice to mobilize the public by focusing on local and transnational environmental spaces of action.