ABSTRACT
Normative discussions surrounding the role of higher education in contributing to sustainable development abound, from the perspectives of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), Sustainability Education, or more specifically Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD).Despite familiar calls for interdisciplinarity and more research to advance higher education to facilitate a global transition to sustainability, however, such discussions rarely involve natural scientists, engineers or technologists striving to establish ‘Sustainability Science’ as an academic field and are often silent on crucial relations between ESD and Sustainability Science in the context of re-purposing higher education and research. This can be partly explained by different ‘epistemic communities’ formed by ESD experts on the one hand, and scientists who promote Sustainability Science on the other. This chapter discusses potential synergies between ESD and Sustainability Science by 1) contextualising them in global ‘policyscapes’ (Carney 2009), and 2) exploring how ESD and Sustainability Science can reinforce each other. Literature investigating links between ecological science and environmental education has
long pointed out the importance for knowledge producers and knowledge users to identify problems and develop solutions to them together (see, for example, Beal et al. 1986;Maarleveld and Dabgbégnon 1999). In recent years, literature on ‘social learning’ for natural resources management has inspired practitioners and scholars of ESD to highlight the importance of stakeholder communication and interaction in change-oriented learning processes (LotzSisitka 2012). The added value of this chapter is not so much underscoring the importance of developing learning partnerships as drawing attention to the fact that calls for integration of knowledge are gaining prominence in an emerging policy common sense or global ‘policyscapes’. Whereas context embedded research and education, starting from real-life problems, are important aspects of Sustainability Science and ESD, the purpose of this chapter is not to show how they manifest themselves in different settings. Rather, this chapter intends to enhance HESD stakeholders’ understanding of global frameworks that would affect directly and indirectly the implementation of HESD on the ground in the coming decade. The chapter aims at enriching the field of HESD by identifying common challenges and opportunities
faced by ESD and Sustainability Science in the international policy community’s ongoing efforts to set post-2015 education and development agendas as well as the scientific community’s efforts to set a new knowledge agenda.
