2010). For example, some have established a stand-alone School of Sustainability (e.g., Arizona State University), others have embedded the sustainability program within an existing department (e.g., Furman University), and still others have used a multi-disciplinary umbrella
approach that shares existing faculty and courses across disciplines (e.g., Baldwin Wallace University). These different models may lead to considerable variations in the curricular structure, design, and content of the program offered. While the approach to organizational design may vary, there appears to be some consensus on the core concepts that a sustainability program should address in terms of curricular content, including bridging social and natural sciences (Kates et al. 2001; Clark and Dickson 2003; Andersson et al. 2008) and understanding BI 10773 price the interconnectedness of social, environmental,
and economic systems (Tilbury 1995). There are also suggestions for the learning approach that should be employed to study these concepts, including taking an inter- and trans-disciplinary approach (Martens et al. 2010; Brundiers and Wiek 2013) and engaging with the local context and community needs in the participatory production Inhibitor Library concentration of scientific knowledge (Brundiers et al. 2010; Yarime et al. 2012). However, despite the proliferation of academic work to propose definitions and standards for the field of sustainability and its core concepts, less work has been done to evaluate the state and curricular content of existing degree programs in sustainability. The most comprehensive sustainability curriculum assessments have been done for Australia, where Sherren (2005, 2006, 2008) evaluated the required courses for that country’s environmental programs more generally, including nine programs granting degrees in sustainability. There have also been reviews that considered the presence of sustainability concepts within specific disciplines in selleck kinase inhibitor certain geographic areas, for example, engineering in Europe (Segalàs
et al. 2008) and the built environment in Asia–Pacific (Iyer-Raniga and Andamon 2012), but to Temsirolimus cost date there has been no international analysis of the curriculum design, structure, and content of higher education degree programs in sustainability taught in English. This study set out to assess the curriculum structure and content of higher education programs offering degrees in sustainability by analyzing those programs that explicitly identify themselves and their graduates as representing the field of sustainability (which we call “sustainability focused” programs), in contrast to programs that incorporate aspects of sustainability within an existing discipline (e.g., sustainability management).