Fighting for poverty through practical, integrated and multidisciplinary education: the case of master programs in development practice

During the last decade, there have been many attempts to align management education with global social responsibility. Universities have made important strides in advancing ethics and socially responsible values into their curricula for Master in Business Administration (MBA), Master in Public Administration (MPA) and other professional master degree programmes (Swanson and Fisher 2008). Creating future development leaders requires us to move beyond narrow concepts of business ethics and social responsibility and use an integrated, multidisciplinary approach capable of understanding and engaging world problems for sustainable solutions and poverty reduction (Moldoveanu and Martin 2008; Ritter 2006).It requires educating capable, collaborative and innovative sustainable development managers and leaders (Parkin 2010). In spite of many promising advances in international service learning, civic engagement and other socially responsible academic initiatives, higher education still has to recognise its academic social responsibility toward global poverty. While advances in sustainability curricula in higher education continue (Blewitt and Cullingford 2004), most academic institutions still have to consider the urgency of implementing integrated curricula and programmes to adequately respond to global poverty and sustainable development (Tavanti and Mousin 2008).