




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 2 (2): 31–32, July 2019 

 
CONVERSATIONS: Practising Sustainability Science: Challenges in 
Teaching and Research  
 

Sustainability Education: The Importance of Diversity 
 

Harini Nagendra   
 
We live in extraordinary times. The vast global crisis of sustainability 
manifests itself on multiple frontiers. For the first time in human history, 
we are at risk of crossing multiple planetary boundaries related to Earth 
system processes critical to our future survival. The recent global 
assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on 
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimates that more than 1 million 
species are at risk of extinction, threatening the safety nets that protect the 
livelihoods and food security of millions of people across the world. Effects 
of global warming by more than 1°C are increasingly making their 
consequences felt in a wide range of natural disasters. The severity of these 
impacts is bound to accelerate in the coming years. 

Academic understanding of sustainability have failed to keep pace with the 
growing need. First, as Hassan (this issue) stresses, there is a clear global 
north-south divide. Our paradigms of understanding and action are 
dominantly driven by the global north, whereas the “ground zero” of 
climate change impacts is squarely in the global south. Second, as Hassan as 
well as Rai and Lele (this issue) point out, there is a disciplinary imbalance. 
Insights from sustainability science and economics tend to have a greater 
impact in shaping global discourse as compared to insights from the social 
sciences, and from practice.  

The three papers in this special section provide diverse, yet complementary 
perspectives on how to address some of the challenges of the sustainability 
crisis through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary education, drawing on 

                                                           
 Editor and Coordinator for this Conversations section. School of Development, Azim 
Premji University, Pixel B, PES campus, Hosur Road, Electronic City, Bangalore 560035; 
harini.nagendra@apu.edu.in. 

Copyright © Nagendra 2019. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i2.72  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i2.72


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [32] 

educational experiences within the global south. Hassan provides a global 
overview of sustainability science and education, and stresses the 
importance of learning from southern educational experiences such as that 
of the Southern African Development Community Regional Environmental 
Education Program (SADC-REEP). Purushothaman (this issue) describes 
the learnings from sustainability education within a Masters’ programme at 
Azim Premji University (in which this author is also closely involved). She 
highlights the importance of keeping the complexity and normative aspects 
of sustainability alive in the classroom without descending into vagueness. 
Rai and Lélé describe their experiences with teaching early career 
researchers in a PhD programme in Conservation Science and Sustainability 
Studies at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. 
They stress the need to train students to question the value-laden biases that 
shape their own research from within, and to challenge existing unequal 
power structures from without, so that research-informed critique is linked 
to action.  

It is also interesting that each of these essays uses a different term to 
explore sustainability. While all three articles stress the need to bridge 
disciplinary divides, Hassan approaches sustainability from the perspective 
of sustainability science, while Rai and Lélé focus on a normative goal of 
sustainable development, and Purushothaman deliberately sheds both 
suffixes to focus on sustainability. Each of these terms is carefully selected 
and has merit to its choice, reminding us that sustainability is a complex 
term, and sustainability education must not narrowly define and bound 
itself, if it has to have wider meaning. 

 


