Higher Education And Sustainable Development: Paradox And Possibilty( Series - Key Issues In Higher Education )

Is it actually possible to mandate, plan, monitor and evaluate the higher education sector's route to the production of educated, innovative, independent, self-determining, critical individuals while at the same time achieving a range of wider policy goals on the side?

This book examines this question in the context of an international policy issue - sustainable development. Over the last thirty years, the idea of sustainable development has come to be seen in policy circles across the globe - UN agencies, national governments and international NGOs - as a necessary and urgent response to a range of social and environmental issues that both threaten the integrity of the biosphere and human well-being. Increasingly, higher education is seen to have a key role to play in this development, yet sustainable development is more than just an externally mandated policy target: it has fundamental implications for learning and teaching.

Illustrated by four in-depth case studies this book considers these complex inter-relationships of a free society and sustainable development in the context of higher education and makes recommendations for realistic future development.