Jem Bendell is a British professor of sustainability leadership and founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Cumbria. He has written about monetary economics and the need for 'Deep Adaptation' in response to environmental crises. He regularly comments on current affairs and approaches that may help humanity face climate-induced disruption. In 2019 he founded the to support responses to societal disruption from dangerous climate change.
Career
Bendell graduated from Cambridge University in 1995, beginning his career at the World Wide Fund for Nature UK. There, he helped to develop the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council. He specialised on relationships between NGOs and business, pointing out their potential, despite the power inequities and the way in which business agendas tend to prevail over those of the non-profit sector. He also became involved in the anti-globalisation movement, later writing a United Nations report on the conflict between business and civil society. He founded Lifeworth, a progressive professional services company mostly working with UN agencies and worked part time as an associate professor of management at Griffith Business School. After his time consulting for the United Nations, in 2012 Bendell joined Cumbria University and founded the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability. On account of this work, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. In a 2011 TEDx talk he expanded his focus to monetary reform and complementary currencies, mentioning Bitcoin, and predicting that Facebook would launch their own currency. In 2006, Bendell worked with the World Wide Fund for Nature UK, analysing and ranking the social and environmental performance of luxury brands. His resulting report, Deeper Luxury: Quality and Style When the World Matters, was discussed internationally in over 50 newspapers as of late 2007. The report argued that luxury brands were not meeting the expectations of customers for high performance on social and environmental issues. In the 2017 United Kingdom general election, he provided strategic communication advice to the Leader of the Labour Party. As of 2008, he had published over fifty publications, two books, and four United Nations reports. In his 2014 book Healing Capitalism, Bendell proposes a new way of respecting private property whereby ownership rights would place a duty on owners to maintain demonstrable accountability to anyone directly affected by their property. This need for "capital accountability" would compel shareholders to be as interested in how corporations are accountable to stakeholders as they would be in either share price or dividends.
