Education for Sustainable Development and Academic Quality: Principles and Processes for Higher Education Providers

This document reports the findings and recommendations from the “ESD and Academic Quality” QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project. Led by De Montfort University, the project aimed to identify how Academic Quality (AQ) processes could support adoption of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

Our project has been driven by a focus on providing insights of value to HEI practitioners, recognising the diversity of roles of staff and students with an interest in ESD, and the great range of contexts within HEIs which will shape viable and appropriate approaches.

Three aspects to this work that we agreed were highly significant are:

1. Institutional and departmental context is a key driver of what is possible in a particular HEI. This includes the nature and degree of strategic commitments to sustainable development and capacity of staff and students.
2. Whilst strategic commitments to sustainability or ESD are increasingly frequent, explicit inclusion of ESD in AQ and SV processes is still rare. It is therefore timely to produce a report highlighting specific examples of what this can look like from a range of settings.
3. Although addressing ESD in AQ and SV processes is an important component of its mainstreaming across an institution, it is likely to be ineffective without a wider enabling environment, that motivates and empowers students and staff to understand the agenda and put it into practice.