Sustainability & Impact

The Centre for Environmental Management and Sustainable Development is FON's academic home for environmental management, the circular economy and the green transition. Its staff teach at both undergraduate and master level and contribute to FON's summer school, so that the research base and the teaching provision are the same people.

Further centres extend this work into adjacent fields: public administration; small and medium enterprises and entrepreneurship; quality management and standardisation; technology management; innovation management; interdisciplinary research in management; efficiency analysis; and business decision-making.

Research outputs are openly available through FON's institutional repository. Research involving human participants is submitted for ethical clearance before it begins.

We research our own sustainability, and publish the result

Under the FAZON project the Centre surveyed 115 undergraduate and master students on FON's environmental performance, rating the old and new buildings separately on energy, water and waste management on a seven-point scale. Students rated their own environmental awareness at 5.06 but their environmental activism at 3.94. FON publishes this gap rather than hiding it, because it shows the work still to be done. The study was presented at the SPIN conference and is available in the repository.

People and inclusion

FON's Plan for Equal Representation of the Sexes, 2022–2026, sets out the measures and targets in force, and its implementation is overseen by the Gender Equality Committee. FON publishes the national legal framework that applies alongside it (the Law on Gender Equality, the Law on the Prohibition of Discrimination and the Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence), so that students and staff can see the rules they can rely on. Provision for students with disabilities, financial support and scholarships, and support for the wellbeing of students and staff are described in the student services pages.

Conduct, integrity and the use of AI

Students are bound by the Code of Professional Ethics of the University of Belgrade, and must pass two compulsory courses, Academic Integrity 1 and Academic Integrity 2, before writing any academic work. The first covers the ethical code governing the academic community; the second covers academic writing, correct citation, paraphrasing and summarising.

The Code of Professional Ethics of the University of Belgrade binds staff and students alike: it prohibits discrimination and harassment, requires conflicts of interest to be avoided and attempted corruption to be reported, sets the rules for research involving people, and obliges every member of the university community to act responsibly towards the environment. The forms of non-academic conduct in written work, namely plagiarism, false authorship, fabrication or falsification of results and self-plagiarism, apply to seminar papers and final theses at every level of study. FON adds detailed rules on the misuse of artificial intelligence. The rules distinguish generative tools from assistive ones. Using AI to write or generate any part of a paper, chapter, case study, experiment or questionnaire is not permitted. Editing to improve readability is permitted, provided the tool used and the purpose are declared, and provided the intellectual and scientific content remains the author's own. Teaching staff are equally bound: they may not paste original student work into tools that retain it in a database.

Every final thesis is checked with FON's official originality software, which reports both text similarity and estimated AI-generated writing. The FON library performs the final check before defence and informs the examination committee of the result. Cases of non-academic conduct are dealt with through the University's disciplinary rules and, where appropriate, FON's Ethics Committee.

Environment and operations

Environmental sustainability reporting is a specific objective of FON's Development Strategy 2023–2033.

Separately from the Strategy, members of staff run FAZON (Faculty Engaged for Sustainability and Progress), an internal project of their own initiative. It has built a reporting framework based on real data and set measurable targets: a 20% cut in energy use, a 30% cut in waste with a 50% rise in recycling, a 15% cut in water use, and a 25% cut in greenhouse-gas emissions. The first data series will be published once complete.

Procurement and resources

FON is developing an approach to responsible procurement, so that environmental and social criteria are applied consistently when goods and services are purchased.