While there is a long-standing tradition examining European areas in economic decline, including mitigating cohesion policies: and abundant literature on electoral outcomes and attitudes, including populism, Euroscepticism and the Brexit vote, we have limited knowledge about how the sub-national context influences political attitudes in Europe towards domestic institutions and international organizations. This gap speaks to a broader puzzle about the role of residential context for political behavior. This workshop brings together contributions that investigate the relationship between the geography of inequality and political discontent in Europe, providing a much-needed EU-wide and longitudinal approach.What? Why? How?

This research workshop explores how new sustainability demands for corporate action impact boards. It remains unclear how boards manage new pressures for social and environmental actions from public regulators, institutional investors, buyers, employees, and other stakeholders. This research workshop explores an emerging research agenda that links the fields of corporate governance and sustainability to shed light on how we can understand how boards address new demands for sustainability. The workshop focuses on young scholars who are developing new work and seeking to establish themselves in their profession. The goal of the workshop is to give them an opportunity to discuss their work with leading professors from CBS and abroad to further develop and strengthen their scholarship.What? Why? How?

What are the priorities of men and women in ‘work’ and ‘life’? Why are men still under-represented in parental leave ? Does new EU-regulated work-life balance policy equalize parental leave for men and women? What firm-level work-life balance policies do employees look for at their work-place? Do leaders and HR departments hinder or facilitate work-life balance, and how? AGILE work-life balance answers these questions in 3 interrelated yet distinct empirical research WPs, focusing on the individual level (citizens), institutions and outcomes, as well as the firm-level. The empirical analyses provide material to develop a common, unifying theorization of WLB, developed through an abductive method. The new empirical material and theorization will be utilized to develop pedagogical case-based material for teaching purposes, for students in business administration, public policy and executive level training.

Like energy and automotive before it, UK freight transport is now on the cusp of a socio-technical transition away from fossil fuel dependency. This transition will require major investment to fleet and infrastructure, cause disruption to assets and business models, and will trigger significant reconfiguration. Whilst the scaling up of fossil phase-out is most likely to occur from the 2030s onwards, the next 10 years of investments are critical to enabling the transition, and to mitigating transition risks to the "hard to abate" freight sectors, and by association UK trade. Our concept to address this challenge is for a Network of broad but interconnected academic excellence integrated with key and leading stakeholders in freight decarbonisation, that collaboratively develops and applies knowledge and understanding of rapid freight decarbonisation. We will use this Network to collect and distil current knowledge, as well as to identify and de-risk the key remaining research challenges that can unleash significant freight-decarbonisation targeted investment and guide enabling policy. This Network connects five freight transport investments made by the EPSRC with a track record of a whole systems approach to decarbonisation of UK freight flows (international and national), and of closely integrating and embedding research with industry and policy makers alike. The Network's efforts will be guided by a number of features of UK freight transport including: (i) significant fixed infrastructure with long timescales for investment (ii) lack of consensus on the specific technological solutions for each mode (iii) a complex combination of national and international transport systems (iv) besides the road and rail network, a limited scope for public sector investment (v) Complex governance involving a mix of UK, EU and international (UN) regulation. The Network will align and integrate directly with UK government and existing initiatives including (i) Industrial strategy (ii) Clean Growth Strategy (iii) Road to zero (iv) Clean Maritime Council (v) UN agency fora (vi) World Bank's Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (vii) ongoing work on aligning investment to decarbonisation with: European Investment Bank, UK private sector institutions, IFC and IMF, and leading investment NGOs: 2 degrees investing, World Economic Forum, Global Maritime Forum, Global Shippers Forum, UK FTA. To achieve this Network's objective of unleashing significant investment for freight decarbonisation, it is organised into five multi-modal and cross-cutting thematic areas and executed through a three-step approach: Theme 1: Role of data and models for unlocking implementation decision making Theme 2: Managing macroeconomic, policy and technology uncertainty, whilst mitigating climate risk in investment decisions Theme 3: Fuel and propulsion technology pathways Theme 4: Aligning drivers for decarbonisation investment/policy with local (inc. air pollution), UK, EU and Global climate policy and integrating into private sector decision making Theme 5. Coupling the evolution of logistics with decarbonizing freight Step 1: Refinement of current knowledge and perspectives into a focused set of research questions covering each of the five themes Step 2: Commissioning of a series (~13) small projects which can develop further understanding of these questions and the methods suitable for addressing them Step 3: Distillation of the Network's knowledge, in combination with the outputs of the small projects, to produce a strategy to drive freight decarbonisation investment, and an agenda and plan describing a series of further collaboration and funding activity that can sustain the Network