Panel discussion of the state of the field of systems education and the opportunities for developing its reach and impact
Education for Sustainability Leadership – Supporting and Empowering Agents for Sustainability Transformations
Jayne Bryant
The global challenges of our time are unprecedented and urgent action for transformation is needed of our systems, policies, institutions and our ways of thinking. Education of sustainability leaders is a key leverage points to achieve this and it is our worldviews, paradigms and ways of being, doing and thinking that have created our systems and structures and therefore transformative learning and leadership development that addresses this is key. In this relatively new field, practitioners and educators grapple with what best promotes sustainability leadership development, and with what competencies, capacities and transformative outcomes educators should be aiming to develop. How do we best design and operate learning experiences that truly build capacity for leadership for sustainability? As an educator and facilitator of sustainability work for over a decade, working at the crossroads of education for sustainability leadership; organisational and community change, lecturing on leadership for sustainability in Australia and currently being Co-Director of the Master’s in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (MSLS) program in Sweden, I have rested this PhD thesis firmly within an action-oriented transformations research paradigm in which the only way to understand a system is through a comprehensive attempt to change it. Seven cases of sustainability leadership education are presented in this compilation thesis. Methods include surveys with open questions; workshops; interviews; document analysis; field notes and one case is an ethnography of a bureaucracy undergoing an organisational change program in a local government in Perth, Western Australia and the learning and policy interventions that supported this change. The aim of this work was to establish an improved understanding of this and to find recommendations for practitioners and educators with ambitions to create systems change for sustainability by building the capacity of people to be sustainability leaders.