A Phenomenological Study of Education for Sustainable Development in Higher Education of Pakistan

Abstract

Sustainable development in higher education is still at infancy stagewhile the aim was to train our youth to be sustainable leaders forensuring conservation of the environment, society and economy forfuture. The leading purpose of the paper was to unfold the situation offive universities for the level of embeddedness of education forsustainable development in preparing their students as sustainableleaders. The nature of the study was qualitative and phenomenologicalapproach through semi-structured interviews (validated by four expertsof related field) conducted from department heads of universities presentin Lahore. Three themes (along with sub exclusive functionalities of theuniversity) were noted during qualitative analysis of the collected data.The findings indicated various levels of embeddedness of education forsustainable development i.e. high, medium or low in the form of threepillars of sustainability (economic, social and environmental),in theuniversity education and research, university operations and externalcommunity.