Sustainability Education: Towards Total Sustainability Management Teaching

Abstract

The triple bottom line [TBL] “definition” of sustainable development [SD] is basically flawed. This prevailing school of thought adopted wholesale by much of business, industry and government is not making much headway in the quest for a sustainable future (Our Common Future 1987) [OCF]. What’s more, many higher educational establishments are themselves followers of this current thinking, embellishing and serving it rather than challenging or redressing it and thus exacerbating the problem further (Jones et al., Sustainability education: Perspectives and practice across Higher Education, 2010). A rethink and a re-focussing of the true meaning and nature of SD and of the resulting consequences for practical environmental and sustainability management, is long overdue. As early as 2001 the authors introduced, at Masters and post graduate level a teaching program that clearly defines a structure and methodology for Total Sustainability Management [TSM] for business, enabling the generation of strategies for the attainment of sustainable processing. This paper summarises the failures of the TBL approach to SD, and also the development, procedure and implementation schema of the teaching program and its outcomes over the last 15 years with particular reference to the EU Masters program at the Ecole des Mines, Nantes in France.