Abstract
Advancing transformations towards sustainability calls for change agents equipped with a new set of competencies. Such sustainability competencies have been articulated with multiplicity and ambiguity, which is counterproductive to joint and accelerated progress. A unified framework of sustainability learning objectives would provide guidance to students, educators, and administrators of sustainability programs. To this end, we carried out a systematic review of the relevant literature. After scanning thousands of publications, we identified over 270 peer-reviewed articles of highest relevance, spanning two decades. Despite appearance otherwise, we found that there is a high level of agreement among scholars over the sustainability competencies that students should be trained in. Expanding on the five key competencies, namely, systems-thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic, and interpersonal competence, that have gained widespread use, this article synthesizes the new suggestions made over the past decade into a unified framework. It centers on 8 key competencies in sustainability (the 5 established and 3 emerging—intrapersonal, implementation, and integration competence), which are complemented by separate disciplinary, general, and other professional competencies. This comprehensive framework of key competencies in sustainability is applicable across disciplines and can guide faculty, students, and practitioners in their joint efforts to advance transformations towards sustainability.
Highlights
To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by addressing persistent sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and socio-economic injustices requires ambitious and whole-scale transformations of societies worldwide (UNESCO, 2017; Scoones et al, 2020)
Competencies for Advancing Sustainability capable of advancing transformations (Gordon et al, 2019). The characteristics of such transformational change agents should be reflected in the learning objectives of sustainability programs
Guidance is unlikely to come via high-level policy (Mochizuki, 2016), as neither the UNDESD, nor the more recent SDG 4.7, which calls for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) globally (Giangrande et al, 2019), provide any explicit learning objectives, let alone a coherent framework for advancing transformations
Summary
To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by addressing persistent sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and socio-economic injustices requires ambitious and whole-scale transformations of societies worldwide (UNESCO, 2017; Scoones et al, 2020). Facilitating these transformations will require novel approaches (Linnér and Wibeck, 2019) that ought to be carried out by change agents who are educated in sustainability and sustainable development (Franco et al, 2019; Redman et al, 2021). UNESCO has articulated how key competencies in sustainability can be utilized to develop educational programming around all seventeen of the SDGs (UNESCO, 2017)
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