
Barry Ness
Senior Lecturer, Docent

Establishing sustainability science in higher education institutions: towards an integration of academic development, institutionalization, and stakeholder collaborations
Author
Summary, in English
The field of sustainability science aims to understand the complex and dynamic interactions between natural and human systems in order to transform and develop these in a sustainable manner. As sustainability problems cut across diverse academic disciplines, ranging from the natural sciences to the social sciences and humanities, interdisciplinarity has become a central idea to the realm of sustainability science. Yet, for addressing complicated, real-world sustainability problems, interdisciplinarity per se does not suffice. Active collaboration with various stakeholders throughout society-transdisciplinarity-must form another critical component of sustainability science. In addition to implementing interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in practice, higher education institutions also need to deal with the challenges of institutionalization. In this article, drawing on the experiences of selected higher education academic programs on sustainability, we discuss academic, institutional, and societal challenges in sustainability science and explore the potential of uniting education, research and societal contributions to form a systematic and integrated response to the sustainability crisis.
Department/s
- LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)
Publishing year
2012
Language
English
Pages
101-113
Publication/Series
Sustainability Science
Volume
7
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Springer
Topic
- Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
Keywords
- Higher education institutions
- Interdisciplinarity
- Transdisciplinarity
- Institutionalization
- Stakeholder collaboration
- Social experimentation
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1862-4057