What motivates students to be sustainability change agents in the face of adversity?

The world faces significant challenges that require transformative changes facilitated by Sustainability Change Agents (SCAs). Universities around the world have explicitly taken up the responsibility of developing in students the skills and knowledge (i.e., competencies) necessary to be successful SCAs. While there is clear convergence around planning competencies, intrapersonal and implementation competencies have recently emerged in the literature. These competencies will have to remain effective even in the face of adversity, yet too little is known about sources of motivation for SCAs and how motivation can be maintained despite these inevitable setbacks. Since the needed transformations will be collective processes, motivation to be a SCA needs to be understood in the social and realistic context in which they would be applied. This study sought to gain specific insights into: 1.) What motivates students to be SCAs? 2.) How do these SCAs maintain their motivation in the face of setbacks? 3.) What can higher education institutions (e.g., universities, colleges) do to better support the motivation of SCAs? In order to gain insights into these questions, 83 aspiring SCAs were surveyed and their responses analyzed using qualitative content analysis. For this group of SCAs, the key source of motivation evolved from a focus on nature, learning, and individual behavior to a more social view with a concern for structural change. Moreover, social networks and intrapersonal skills helped to restore students' motivation following setbacks. Despite being university students, the SCAs surveyed had already experienced significant setbacks and, largely without institutional support, learned strategies to overcome them and maintain their motivation. Motivation and the skills, knowledge, and experience of how to maintain the drive for positive change in the face of setbacks is crucial in order for SCAs to be capable of supporting the critically needed transformations, and universities must play their part in fostering the SCAs' capability.PostprintPeer reviewe

Beyond Interpersonal Competence: Teaching and Learning Professional Skills in Sustainability

Successful careers in sustainability are determined by positive real-world change towards sustainability. This success depends heavily on professional skills in effective and compassionate communication, collaborative teamwork, or impactful stakeholder engagement, among others. These professional skills extend beyond content knowledge and methodical expertise. Current sustainability programs do not sufficiently facilitate students’ acquisition of such skills. This article presents a brief summary of professional skills, synthesized from the literature, and why they are relevant for sustainability professionals. Second, it presents how these skills have been taught in an undergraduate course in sustainability at Arizona State University, USA. Third, it critically discusses the effectiveness and challenges of that exemplary course. Finally, the article concludes with outlining the lessons learned that should be incorporated into future course offerings

Beyond Interpersonal Competence: Teaching and Learning Professional Skills in Sustainability

Successful careers in sustainability are determined by positive real-world change towards sustainability. This success depends heavily on professional skills in effective and compassionate communication, collaborative teamwork, or impactful stakeholder engagement, among others. These professional skills extend beyond content knowledge and methodical expertise. Current sustainability programs do not sufficiently facilitate students’ acquisition of such skills. This article presents a brief summary of professional skills, synthesized from the literature, and why they are relevant for sustainability professionals. Second, it presents how these skills have been taught in an undergraduate course in sustainability at Arizona State University, USA. Third, it critically discusses the effectiveness and challenges of that exemplary course. Finally, the article concludes with outlining the lessons learned that should be incorporated into future course offerings

Do We Teach What We Preach? An International Comparison of Problem- and Project-Based Learning Courses in Sustainability

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Leveraging Post-Disaster Windows of Opportunities for Change towards Sustainability: A Framework

Disasters are catalysts for change: they are increasingly recognized as offering opportunities to direct and navigate change towards aspired outcomes, such as sustainable development goals. However, we know little about how to leverage the opportunities created by disasters to achieve sustainability objectives. Learning from existing case studies is challenging, partly because there is no framework that integrates concepts of change from both sustainability science and disaster recovery literatures. This study develops a unified analytical framework to facilitate the documentation and analysis of case studies of sustainability transitions following disasters. Our aim is to enhance the potential for theory-building, and to draw lessons that can be used to help leverage opportunities presented by disasters in the future. We apply the framework to available empirical cases and identify specific conditions, resources, social relations and constraints that affect disaster-to-sustainability transitions. Our expectation is that this framework will serve professionals and researchers in the fields of sustainable development and disaster mitigation to enhance the effectiveness of their research and applied activities

The Role of Transacademic Interface Managers in Transformational Sustainability Research and Education

Working towards sustainable solutions requires involving professionals and stakeholders from all sectors of society into research and teaching. This often presents a challenge to scholars at universities, as they lack capacity and time needed for negotiating different agendas, languages, competencies, and cultures among faculty, students, and stakeholders. Management approaches and quality criteria have been developed to cope with this challenge, including concepts of boundary organizations, transdisciplinary research, transition management, and interface management. However, few of these concepts present comprehensive proposals how to facilitate research with stakeholder participation while creating educational opportunities along the lifecycle of a project. The article focuses on the position of a transacademic interface manager (TIM) supporting participatory sustainability research and education efforts. We conceptualize the task portfolio of a TIM; outline the capacities a TIM needs to possess in order to successfully operate; and propose an educational approach for how to train students in becoming a TIM. For this, we review the existing literature on TIMs and present insights from empirical sustainability research and educational projects that involved TIMs in different functions. The article provides practical guidance to universities on how to organize these critical endeavors more effectively and to offer students an additional career perspective

A change is gonna come: Designing campus interventions to promote behavior change for sustainable consumption

In this activity, students worked in small groups of 3–4 members to collaborate with campus stakeholders in order to design, implement, and evaluate interventions to promote more sustainable consumption behaviors among the campus community

From hurricanes to pandemics: community-based transformation and destination resilience in Utuado, Puerto Rico

Community-based tourism that is both sustainable and resilient lends strength to the community-based tourism system. Local mobilization of resources, cohesiveness, coordination, opportunities for change, healthy social and natural capital, economic diversification, strong leadership, and management that embraces creativity all build resilience. An example from Utuado, Puerto Rico is presented that illustrates these concepts with conceptual parallel of Hurricane Maria’s devastating impact to that of COVID-19. Post-coronavirus tourism should support local communities that could be resilient, creative, adaptive and transformative while it protects and provides long-term benefits to local communities and people