Sustainability and values assessment in higher education

Abstract

The challenge of planetary sustainability is an urgent and complex issue for which appropriately trained experts and decision-makers are largely lacking. Higher education has been expanding rapidly in this field across a variety of disciplines including in the natural and social sciences, law, governance, international relations and even business, creating new challenges for assessment. In addition, the concept of sustainability includes an ethical dimension that has traditionally been seen to be difficult to assess. This short chapter reviews some of the complexities of sustainability as a subject for teaching and research in higher education, as well as some preliminary work on possible ways forward in the assessment of its values component.