About Us

A panel of six speakers sits on stage in front of a green plant wall and an event sign. One woman speaks into a microphone while the others listen, with an audience visible in the foreground.

Making Markets Fit for the Future

The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) is an impact-led institute within the University of Cambridge. 

Our ambition is to help build resilient, inclusive and sustainable economies by equipping leaders and institutions to respond strategically to disruption and create the conditions for long-term value and prosperity. 

Markets shape where capital flows, which business models thrive and whether innovation succeeds. Yet many remain organised around outdated assumptions and incentives that slow progress. CISL works with partners across business, finance, government and academia to help shape the markets, policies, capabilities and institutions that enable better outcomes.

 

How we work with business

Businesses face increasingly volatile market conditions as climate and nature risk, technological change, resource constraints and geopolitical instability reshape sectors and value chains.

Long-term success depends not only on adapting to these forces, but on helping create the market conditions, policy frameworks and investment signals that make effective responses commercially viable.

CISL helps organisations understand the forces reshaping their sectors, identify new sources of value, build capability to act and develop strategies and innovations that strengthen competitiveness while accelerating wider market change.

Find out how CISL works with business

CISL presenting to Network members in Denmark

How We Create Change

We believe progress depends on more than organisational action alone.

Progress depends on leadership, finance, policy, innovation, infrastructure and demand evolving together.

CISL works across the conditions that determine whether economies can deliver resilience, competitiveness and long-term prosperity. We bring together:

  • Leadership development

  • Sustainable finance

  • Policy engagement

  • Innovation and entrepreneurship

  • Cross-sector collaboration

Together these capabilities help align investment, institutions, incentives and organisational capacity around practical pathways for change.

 

Our impact

For more than three decades, CISL has helped shape business, finance and public policy discussions that influence how economies grow, invest and respond to disruption.

We focus on systems that sit at the heart of long-term economic resilience and prosperity, including energy, the built environment, materials and manufacturing, and food, land and agriculture. Through our programmes, partnerships and networks, we help connect leadership, finance, policy and innovation to accelerate change at scale.

Find out how CISL delivers impact

 

Our place within the University of Cambridge

As an institute within the University of Cambridge, with full departmental status within the School of Technology, CISL draws on the University's rich academic capabilities while fostering practical leadership for global impact.

Our work is interdisciplinary, bridging faculties and institutes within and beyond Cambridge, and contributing to the University's broader mission to serve society through education, research, innovation and knowledge exchange.

 

Our Royal Founding Patron

His Majesty King Charles III is our Royal Founding Patron. His long-standing commitment to sustainability and responsible leadership continues to inspire our work

Find out more