Cardiff University, Global-Civic and Social Sustainability

Universities are increasingly being called upon to redefine their roles beyond traditional research outputs and to respond to pressing societal needs, engaging more meaningfully with their communities and citizens.

In Our future, together… Cardiff University shares its new strategy, setting out a ‘path to 2035’.  This includes a focus on citizen and community engagement at both global and local levels – or ‘Global-Civic’ – including co-creating solutions to ‘the big challenges’ with global and local communities and ‘acting as an anchor institution in our city-region’ benefiting Cardiff, Wales and the world.

Integral to this strategic aim is the interconnection between Cardiff University and the wider Welsh legislative and policy context. The Well Being of Future Generations Act (2015) is particularly relevant, where all aspects of sustainability and a focus on future as well as current generations is mandated and key.

Professor Rachel Ashworth from the Cardiff Business School, who has helped to develop the University’s Global-Civic agenda, sets out the definition of a Global-Civic university and what this means in practice:

‘…being a Global-Civic university means acting on our core purpose and co-creating cultural, economic, environmental, and social value, in Cardiff, Wales, UK and the world, for current and future generations, through our education, research, scholarship and business operations.

In practice, this refers to our ability to purposefully engage, convene, share expertise, and collaborate through our education, research and scholarship to address societal challenges but also includes acting on the social responsibilities that we own as an anchor institution and deliver through our operations.’

On 5 November last year, an institution-wide, Global-Civic Conference – Engaging with purpose: Global Civic collaborations for Future Generations – took place in Cardiff Business School.  This conference brought together colleagues from across the university to build connections, share experiences and discuss the impact of Global-Civic work to date. The aim was to reflect on the strategic positioning of any Global-Civic activities, consider the complexities of purposeful engagement and create a university-wide community of practice to help collective shaping of future priorities and initiatives. Addressing the conference were the Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University, Wendy Larner, the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, Derek Walker and senior leaders from Cardiff Council, to consider how our Global-Civic activities align with societal challenges in our city, well-being priorities for Wales (Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015) and the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Efforts and research to tackle the ‘grand challenges’ of modern slavery and social sustainability at local and global levels are highly relevant in this context, including the work of our Modern Slavery and Social Sustainability Research Group (MSSS RG) which brings these two areas of focus together.  Dr Maryam Lotfi, Co-Chair of the MSSS RG, presented at the Global-Civic Conference on Welsh SMEs and Social Sustainability: An Exploration of Challenges and Potential Solutions, reporting on research she conducted with Amy Boote (PhD student in Cardiff Business School), fellow MSSS RG Co-Chair Dr Anna Skeels from SPARK and Dr Marian Buhociu from the University of South Wales.  This research was funded by Medr and conducted in partnership with Cardiff Capital Region (CCR), Media Cymru and the Centre for the Creative Economy (CCE).

In the study of Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM), the social dimension of sustainability is often overlooked, with a greater focus on environmental and economic dimensions.  When social sustainability is considered, the complexity of lived experience is rarely captured.  It is essential to ‘humanise supply chains’ – the titular message of our MSSS RG hosted Business and Modern Slavery Conference last year – considering these lived realities across different contexts to inform our fuller understanding.

Social sustainability remains particularly under-researched in the context of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs account for more than 90% of firms globally and are vital to the economy yet often left out of the sustainability debate. Unlike large firms, they may lack the formal departments, standards and regulations that often drive sustainability reporting but, with strong community ties, flatter hierarchies and trust-based relationships, have the potential to support socially sustainable practice.

Our research sought to better understand not just whether, but how social sustainability is enabled and constrained within SMEs, working with CCR and with a specific focus on Creative Industries in this region.  CCR has become one of the UK’s leading creative and media sectors outside of London (including film, tv, gaming, music, broadcasting and digital content), with more than 600 firms generating around £350 million and employing about 7% of the local workforce. Unlike more traditional sectors, the Creative Industries rely heavily on short-term projects and networks. Work tends to be flexible but also unstable, with many people employed on a freelance or informal basis. This creates real challenges: issues like unequal access to opportunities, burnout from relentless project cycles, exclusion of underrepresented groups, and sometimes even informal exploitation. These are systemic, not isolated, problems.

Our research findings demonstrate that social capital in SMEs operates as a double-edged resource: it provides agility, resilience, and collaboration, but simultaneously reproduces exclusion, weakens shared understanding, and entrenches exploitative practices.

Such research collaborations amongst academics and partner organisations working in and on Cardiff and the CCR and focusing on global challenges at local level contribute to Cardiff University’s Global-Civic role.  Engaging those working in the Creative Industries and living in our ‘city-region’ in research on social sustainability is essential for us as a university to add social value locally but also feed into debates and discussion around social sustainability at national and international levels.  Such work not only aligns to our institutional Global-Civic agenda, but what the MSSS RG was set up to achieve.