School Leaders’ Challenges in Education for Sustainable Development: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Despite advances on the global Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) agenda, school leaders continue to confront challenges in implementing ESD in formal educational systems. The challenges staged from the ESD program's establishment until the ESD activities' enrichment. This study aimed to identify the ESD challenges as addressed in other studies. A scoping review was conducted as the methodology to discover the challenges. Articles were retrieved from four databases between 2014 and 2021, yielding a corpus of 67 articles that were synthesized systematically using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). The results present the multiple forms of challenges in ESD and are themed into two factors, (1) Intrinsic factor and (2) Extrinsic factor. The ESD challenges for intrinsic factors further developed three sub-groups of the challenges, (1) being a change agent and a visionary leader, (2) acquiring a high level of knowledge in ESD, and (3) having a high confidence level of robust decision-making. The extrinsic factor synthesized all other challenges of ESD that resulted from non-individual and the education system derivative challenges. Identification of ESD challenges will help school leaders and policymakers to manage and recontextualize ESD programs in a direction that positively favors stakeholders involved in ESD.