Sustainability science and the university: pitfalls and bridges to interdisciplinarity

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity plays a major role in the debate about the sustainability of human societies, in general, and about the crisis and the future of the University. If the twentieth century can be identified as an era of specialization in Academia, there is a tendency now to add interdisciplinary spaces to the traditional disciplinary research and training organization. Non-academic research institutions (NARIs) are showing more flexibility than universities to respond to problem-oriented demands. This article analyzes the current prevalence of a rigid disciplinary academic framework and discusses its limitations in the face of complex demands, such as sustainability science (SS) and technology. Examples from the Brazilian graduate programs in SS are presented to describe some institutional pathologies that usually affect the attempts to achieve interdisciplinarity and SS and technology. Among the main conclusions, are the need for more interaction among universities and NARIs and the need to integrate disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, rather than continue to deal with them as opposites.

Keywords:

• sustainability
• higher education
• environmental education
• universities

Acknowledgments

We thank comments and contributions to the original manuscript made by three anonymous EER reviewers. Most of their observations were taken into account. However, we decided against following an all-encompassing suggestion made by one of the reviewers, who called for shifting the balance of the article ‘from review and rehearsal of issues to a more earnest description, examination, and synthesis of promising developments – theoretically and empirically around important central problems of ‘sustainability’ as they are encountered and resolved within the Brazilian academic/research context and, possibly, in relation to international arrangements and partnerships.’ We think that the ‘review and rehearsal’ narrative is more appropriate to the discussion of a complex matter in a necessarily compact journal article. Besides, a number of ‘promising developments’ are mentioned in the text. In a similar vein, the same reviewer proposed that we ‘separate off’ several sections and develop them as separate articles. Although this is an attractive proposal, and the authors are engaged in research that may lead to the expansion of some points made in the present article, we decided to maintain the content of the original manuscript and, for the time being, refer to other published relevant studies.

Notes

1. One EER anonymous reviewer asked if the ‘Star Model’ is working. The question is legitimate, but the answer lies beyond the scope of this article. However, the authors are currently engaged in research about the workings of this model, inside and outside Brazil.