Four Quality Education

An introduction to Education for Sustainable Development

Author: Nick Bunyan

This guide introduces the key concepts and learning and teaching practices associated with developing students’ knowledge, skills, values and capabilities to engage with complex real-world sustainable development problems.

Overview

“ESD gives learners of all ages the knowledge, skills, values and agency to address interconnected global challenges including climate change, loss of biodiversity, unsustainable use of resources, and inequality. It empowers learners of all ages to make informed decisions and take individual and collective action to change society and care for the planet. ESD is a lifelong learning process and an integral part of quality education. It enhances the cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural dimensions of learning and encompasses learning content and outcomes, pedagogy and the learning environment itself.” (UNESCO, 2024)

“ESD develops competencies, that is, skills, attributes and values, and how they link to subject knowledge and knowledge of sustainable development. ESD supports learners across all academic disciplines and subject areas to create and pursue visions of a better world.” (QAA, 2021)

Benefits

  • Motivational topic for many students and staff (NUS, 2023).
  • Supports sector drivers for increasing sustainability in the curriculum including revised subject benchmark statements, PSRB requirements, and QAA ESD guidance (QAA, 2021).
  • Aligns with the development of future employability skills for example (WEF, 2025).
  • Enhances current sustainability teaching within and across programmes through sharing of effective practice and identifying areas for further development.
  • Supports the sustainability objectives in our Sustainability Strategy and the Education and student experience themes within Strategy 2031.

Putting it into practice

The eight competencies for sustainability outlined in the QAA’s guidance for ESD (QAA, 2021)  (systems thinking, futures thinking, critical thinking, strategic competency, collaborative competency, integrated problem-solving competency, self-awareness competency, normative competency) can be developed using teaching approaches and learning activities that enable students to:

  1. Broaden their sustainability knowledge through connecting subject content to key sustainability issues (e.g. climate change, poverty, inequality), and the UN’ Sustainable Development Goals.
  2. Reflect on their own sustainability values and perspectives and the diversity of other’s (other students, external stakeholders) perceptions and values.
  3. Explore the Interrelationship between social, economic and environmental factors (systems thinking) for 'real-world' complex sustainability issues.  
  4. Envision positive futures to create probable, possible, desirable scenarios, and explore their preconceptions (and possibly fears and misconceptions) about the future.
  5. Engage with complex ‘wicked’ problem solving approaches that are suited to ‘ill-defined’ real-world sustainability issues that are not amenable to simple problem-solving methods.
  6. Collaborate with others in interdisciplinary (between subject areas) and/ or transdisciplinary (with external stakeholders) problem-solving activities focused on real-world sustainability issues simulating contexts they will face outside of higher education.
  7. Provide students with the appropriate support and information to develop their sustainability career aspirations for example through connecting sustainability to specific industry career paths, guidance on module choices, projects, dissertation topics, or placements.

The nature and extent of ESD within a specific programme will vary across different subject areas and is best developed as a dialogic process with stakeholders. ESD Course design resources includes programme level mapping tools and associated guidance that can be used by staff and students to gather data to support a collaborative review process.

Challenges

  • Competencies associated with sustainable development already exist in many degree programmes, though unevenly addressed and often in the absence of explicit sustainability content.
  • The ‘wicked’ nature of sustainability problems requires interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work across boundaries between disciplines, and between universities and wider society.
  • A single one-shot sustainability course is unlikely to bring the transformed mindset and competencies needed to contribute to systemic change.
  • Interdisciplinary project work within traditional university structures is demanding and requires support for academics and students
  • In transdisciplinary collaborations with external partners, students need to be challenged and guided to make the most of the opportunities presented.
  • Assessing ESD competency development can be problematic and relies on approaches that require more than self-reporting by students.

Extracted from Advance HE (2023).

Case studies

CIE maintains a Reading Lists @ Liverpool of ESD case studies organised around faculty and subject areas. CIE will periodically update this case study list with new research and resources.

Support resources

ESD staff support resources provides a single point of information for staff interested in developing ESD within their learning and teaching. This link will enable you to access detailed learning and teaching resources available through CIE’s ESD toolkit that includes:

Learn more about Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) an overview to the learning and teaching theory and practice that underpins ESD.

7 ideas for embedding ESD into your teaching includes links to additional detailed practical teaching resources and ESD case studies.

References

Advance HE (2023) Education for Sustainable Development: a review of the literature 2015-2022

NUS (2023) Sustainability skills survey

Quality Assurance Agency (2021) Education for Sustainable Development: Guidance for UK higher education providers. (Requires QAA membership login)

UNESCO (2024) What you need to know about education for sustainable development

World Economic Forum (2025) The Future of Jobs Report

Help and Feedback

Can you help us improve this resource or suggest a future one? Do you need this resource in an alternative format? Please contact us at cie@liverpool.ac.uk

 

Creative Commons Licence
An introduction to Education for Sustainable Development by Nick Bunyan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.