AGEP Winter-School "Doing Good with Business? Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Entrepreneurship, and Fair Trade"

The Institute of Development Research and Development Policy (IEE) of Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) is happy to host the international conference:

“Doing Good with Business?
Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Entrepreneurship, and Fair Trade”
taking place 9-11 of November 2016.

On three days, approximately 200 conference participants – practitioners, researchers, and students – discuss different approaches which aim at improving the social and environmental effects of production standards and business models: Corporate Social Responsibility, Fair Trade, and Social Entrepreneurship. Diverse questions are addressed, like to which extent those approaches actually fulfil the expectations set in them, whether they are economically viable, what the dominant current challenges as well as the prospects for future developments of these concepts are.

Within the scope of the conference, also another regular event is hosted, the ‘Development Day’: This day is dedicated specifically to research results referring to the conference theme, conducted by researchers of the members of the University Alliance (UA) Ruhr Graduate Centre for Development Studies (these members are the IEE as well as the Institute of Political Science (IfP) and the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF), both of University of Duisburg-Essen). Those presentations supplement the presentations offered by practitioners on the other two conference days.

The conference is funded via the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds of the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (AA). More than 30 alumni are invited and funded to participate at the conference, contributing actively by sharing their experiences and knowledge concerning the abovementioned points of interest. The alumni are graduates of diverse pertinent study programmes: besides alumni of the MA in Development Management (MADM) programme (offered by the IEE), a multitude of further alumni of the institute’s collaboration partners join the conference. This collaboration partners are the MA programme in International and Development Economics (MIDE; HTW Berlin), the Small Enterprise Promotion and Training Programme (SEPT; University of Leipzig), the MA programme in Development and Governance (IfP; University of Duisburg-Essen), and the MA programme in International Relations and Development Policy (INEF; University of Duisburg-Essen).