Education can be seen as an integral part of any credible and potentially effective global governance solution in the context of Sustainable Development. Naturally, (higher) education institutions play a key role in this regard, but these are embedded into a specific context with a range of other actors influencing the extent to which learning for Sustainable Development takes place. In this paper, we examine a range of individual, institutional and country-level contextual factors and their roles in learning for Sustainable Development. We are interested in the extent to which the mass media support education for Sustainable Development through (sustainability-related) first-level agenda-setting. Using the theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980) as the main theoretical framework for our study, we examine the levels of sustainability related knowledge among students from higher education institutions in nine major economies (Brazil, Canada, France, India, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, United Kingdom, United States). For our dependent variable, we turn to a dataset compiled by the Sustainability Literacy Test (SULITEST, 2016), focusing on levels of knowledge in relation to climate change, biodiversity, poverty as well as a number of sustainability-related concepts and theories. The main independent variables included in our multi-level models include cultural, economic, environmental and governance indicators as well as those describing the impact of different higher education institutions and respondents’ individual characteristics. We apply a multi-level modelling technique using Mplus to explore the relative importance of individual, institutional and country-level factors in a real-life setting employing a large-scale dataset. The results help us to contribute towards a more nuanced understanding of sustainability-related learning, and in particular to shed light on the role of the wider country-level contexts in triggering and facilitating sustainability-related knowledge generation. Crucially, they also have clear implications for higher education curricula which is the focal point of our discussion. Before concluding, we develop a set of recommendation for policymakers in the field of education for Sustainable Development.
1c Role of academia (advocacy and education in sustainable development science)
