Overcoming Barriers to Implement Education for Sustainable Development Cultures in Higher Education

Throughout several decades discussing the need for higher education to play a leading role in sustainable development, institutions still struggle embedding Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) practices in their curricula and educational routines. Most of the scholars refer to some bigger barriers such as rigidity of internal structures at all levels (administration, teaching, research and operational); institutional culture fostering mostly multidisciplinary collaboration but failing to move forward to inter and transdisciplinary forms of collaboration and teaching; lack of governance priority to sustainability criteria leading to lack of regulations and resources for enforcement; rigidity of the curricula lacking cross-collaboration among disciplines, departments and teachers; lack of leadership and ESD knowledge in curricular design; programs oriented to meet the needs of sectors and industries and not societal needs; lack of expertise on ESD among the lecturers; lack of training on pedagogical approaches that sustain ESD; workload and lack of space for innovation to experiment with new learning environments. We believe that in the decade of action and the urgency of the moment, higher education institutions and professionals around the world may have managed to fight some of these barriers and their examples could be inspirational to other similar institutions. This special issue could help higher education become a space for sustainability performance by immersing ourselves in narratives of successful actions and learning from each other. The special issue “Overcoming barriers to implement Education for Sustainable Development cultures in higher education” is being proposed as part of the journal "Discover Sustainability".

The Topical Collection welcomes submissions based on scholarly research, case studies and analyses and reflections on how these barriers can be overcome, collecting best practices that can show the ways to eradicate these barriers and move forward. We invite scholars, lecturers and academia teams in general to introduce and/or discuss approaches, methods, initiatives and projects which show how we can transform higher education learning environments in order to fulfill the mandate of SDG 4.7. We welcome topics related to creative innovation spaces for sustainability in higher education; educating the educators practices and experiences; pedagogies to foster ESD; institutional cultures and practices fostering sustainable development; examples of transdisciplinary curricula; accreditation process of higher education contemplating sustainability; etc.

Keywords: Pedagogy/ Education for Sustainable Development/ Sustainability Performance/ Transdisciplinarity/ Creative learning environments/ innovative education/ accreditation higher education/ lectures training and certifications/ global citizenship/