Abstract
Education for sustainable development (ESD) is promoted as one important component in the endeavor toward sustainable development. Goal 4 in the Sustainable Development Goals (UN in Sustainable development goals—17 goals to transform our world, 2017) in particular targets the role of ESD in this respect. The importance of cultural specificity in ESD is emphasized in numerous international policy documents, but there are few cross-cultural studies that focus on the broad context of sustainable development and ESD. The current study investigates the sustainability consciousness of grade 12 students (age 18–19) in Taiwan (N = 617) and Sweden (N = 583) and discusses the implications for ESD policy and practice. The findings indicate that significant differences exist between the two samples, both with respect to their sustainability consciousness and within the three sub-constructs of knowingness, attitudes and self-reported behaviors. The differences are considered in light of the cultural value orientations of the East Asian and Western European regions. Implications for ESD are discussed from the perspective of cultural specificity.
Highlights
Creating sustainable development (SD) is one of the biggest challenges that societies around the world face today
This section starts with some descriptive statistics, which are used in the interpretation and discussion of the results from the multivariate/univariate analysis
The Swedish data indicated some ceiling effects related to the battery of attitude items, which results in lower variance for the Swedish sample
Summary
Creating sustainable development (SD) is one of the biggest challenges that societies around the world face today. Cultural aspects influence the ways environmental, social and economic dimensions and SD are interconnected (UNESCO 2006; Commonwealth Secretariat 2007). ESD should be based on holistic approaches to the environmental, social and economic dimensions of SD and the interconnections between these Core competencies such as critical and systems thinking and collaborative decision making that empower students to be active in finding solutions to local and global problems are highlighted as important outcomes of ESD (UNESCO 2014). Aspects such as values, attitudes and behaviors in the wide and complex context of SD may vary between cultural regions due to different histories and traditions How this general goal can be achieved in a culture-specific way is a question that requires more research
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