EDS Integrated Approach for Sustainability (EDS-IA): Campus as a Living Laboratory Experience

Abstract

Since 2016, Institut EDS is developing a new integrated approach to facilitate collaborations between different disciplines and to reinforce the development of practical skills and key competencies needed to solve concrete sustainable development problems: the EDS-IA. It aims to contribute to the acceleration of the transition to a closed and cyclic development system, building on the most recent knowledge mobilization frameworks in the field: the concept of Planetary Boundaries, the concept of Social Floor, the Sustainable Development Goals, Key Competencies in Sustainability and Multilevel Governance. Despite the broad consensus and the robustness of the scientific knowledge underlying all these frameworks, they are not sufficiently known beyond their own field of knowledge. In order to facilitate their diffusion and their appropriation by all the disciplines and actors concerned with the transition to sustainability, EDS-IA integrates them in a diagram as a tool that can be adapted to different development challenges in different contexts. During its first year of implementation (2016–2017), researchers and student members of the Institute participated in a series of major co-creation activities along with staff university members, governmental organizations as well as representatives of civil society. They made a diagnosis of the sustainable status of the campus and imagined innovating solutions for a “Campus as a living laboratory” through operations, teaching, research, and community services. In the second year (2017–2018), the transfer of the EDS-IA started through similar workshops with a university partner in Senegal (UADB). This paper presents the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the EDS-IA and the results of the first two years during which universities have been imagined as living laboratories for SDG promotion and implementation.