The emergence of a global innovation in education: diffusing Education for Sustainable Development through social networks

Abstract

Since the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), far-reaching efforts have been made to implement ESD worldwide. While ESD seems increasingly to be diffused as a social innovation related to environmental education, we still know little about how the concept is implemented through social relations and what role trust plays in this process. This article applies descriptive and inferential techniques of social network analysis to study how ESD is realised through social relations in Germany and the role of trust in this context. It is assumed that innovations such as ESD, which have been launched at the global level, are employed and diffused through communication exchanges at the regional level. Empirical results from this study show that the realisation of ESD is concentrated on the regional level, demonstrating social relations with high density within the regions and a lack of links beyond regional borders. Furthermore, the links of actors involved in implementing ESD tend to be concentrated on actors from the same sector. Explanations for this can be found in conceptual differences between ESD and environmental education, which have resulted in a serious void between political decisions, educational plans and the practical implementation of ESD.

Keywords:

• Education for Sustainable Development
• environmental education
• social network analysis
• innovation
• cross-sectoral collaboration
• diffusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Summarisation represents one of the three basic forms of interpretation (Mayring 2014).

2 According to the spring-embedding process, network members are conceptualised as nodes connected to one another with springs. The springs between the network nodes push and pull until a state of equilibrium is reached. Thus, the length of the arrows does not have any informational content.

3 To measure the contact frequency, an ordinal scale was used in the questionnaire.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (grant no. NB108A) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant no. KO 4997/1-1).

Notes on contributors

Nina Kolleck

Nina Kolleck is professor of education and policy at Leipzig University. She has developed a solid line of research dealing with environment-related education, methods of Social Network Analysis in education, policy and citizenship education. Before joining Leipzig University, she has been professor of education research at Freie Universität Berlin and professor of education and heterogeneity at University of Aachen. In the last few years she was visiting professor at different international universities such as the University of California, Berkeley (USA), the University of British Columbia Vancouver (Canada), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), and Tel Aviv University. In line with her research interests, she serves as an advisor, consultant and board member for several ministries (e.g. the German Ministry of Education and Research), different councils, foundations and political initiatives and was appointed directorate member of the commission for education management, education planning and educational law (KBBB) by the German Educational Research Association (DGfE). Having gained third party funding and scholarships from different institutions and funders she has currently secured funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Mercator Foundation, the German Ministry of Education and Research and the Joachim Herz Foundation.