The Agbar Chair presents the Award for the Best Master’s Thesis in the Field of Sustainable Development

On Monday, 18 December 2023, Prof. Toni Aira, the Director of the Chair in International Studies in Institutional Communication for Sustainable Development and Growth, founded by the UPF Barcelona School of Management in collaboration with Agbar, presented the first ever Award for the Best Master’s Thesis in the field of Sustainable Development. The objective of these awards is to encourage applied research that directly or indirectly addresses the issue of sustainability and/or sustainable development, with the aim of promoting or raising the visibility of these matters.

This year’s award went to Carlos Argila, who completed his Master’s Thesis in the 2022-23 academic year as part of the Master in Political and Institutional Communication at the UPF-BSM.

Carlos Argila remarked that he was "very grateful for the award, which has been a great source of motivation to keep pushing forward on my thesis, which I was working on throughout the whole academic year and which I wanted to have an impact beyond the academic sphere”.

The panel of judges had to choose between the different candidates from an extremely broad range of UPF-BSM programs who submitted their Master’s Thesis in the hope of winning the award. In this edition, the judges were the Director General of the UPF-BSM, Prof. José Manuel Martínez Sierra, and Prof. Daniel Rajmil and Prof. Aira, the Coordinator and Director of the Chair, respectively.

Eventually, highlighting the bold originality of his work, the judges unanimously chose Argila’s thesis, entitled "Communication manual for sustainable development for small city and town councils. Guidelines for drafting a local communication strategy for the Agenda 2030 and SDGs". In his thesis, the student has managed to transition effectively from theory to practice with a blueprint for a manual that could be successfully applied in a wide range of local institutions in order to achieve greater sustainability in the activities and communications of small city and town councils.

“The award strives to contribute towards a more in-depth knowledge of Agenda 2030 and the SDGs through applied academic research. Therefore, we could not have started with a better example to show that there is a new generation of citizens and professionals who know how to organize themselves and drive progress in this area from their own field of expertise”, explained Prof. Toni Aira.

Having completed this edition of the awards, the call for entries is now open for students completing their Master’s Theses in the 2023-24 academic year to take part in the second edition of the Award for the Best Master’s Thesis in the field of Sustainable Development.