ABSTRACT
The fundamental reorientations and transformations in terms of sustainable development require a far-reaching change of thinking and acting in individuals and society as a whole. This can only be brought about by learning; hence sustainable development has to be understood as a learning process (Vare and Scott 2007). Education for sustainable development (ESD) is expected both to make people more aware and better qualified to take part in shaping future developments responsibly, and to raise their awareness of the problems related to sustainable development and bring forth innovative contributions to all economic, social, environmental and cultural issues. Universities play an important role for fostering ESD ‘by addressing sustainability through
their major functions of education, research and outreach’ (Fadeeva and Mochizuki 2010: 250). By involving higher education in ESD, UNESCO (2009: 5) wants to ‘encourage and enhance scientific excellence, research and new knowledge development for ESD’. Universities are key actors in the process of implementing sustainable development, ‘because they form a link between knowledge generation and knowledge transfer to society both by educating future decision-makers and through societal outreach and service’ (Adomßent and Michelsen 2006: 87-8). Dealing with the concept of sustainable development offers for universities the opportunity to understand and face up to complexity as well as to cope with uncertainty and diverging norms and values, and it facilitates systemic institutional and organisational change of universities and provides them with spaces for future-oriented and transformative thinking and learning (Adomßent et al. 2007). Higher education for sustainable development (HESD) aims at enabling people to not only
acquire and generate knowledge, but also to reflect on further effects and the complexity of behaviour and decisions in a future-oriented and global perspective of responsibility (Rieckmann 2012). Consequently, many universities from all over the world have already initiated activities to address sustainability in their teaching and learning at course level and in the curricula. Research complements these activities and features prominently in the ESD discourse – with distinctive topics and research approaches (Karatzoglou 2013). Over the last decade, a number of research initiatives and postgraduate programmes worldwide gained momentum and engaged with research in this area.However,what is still missing is a systematic overview of state of the art of research on HESD.
