Collective competences for sustainability
Creators: name: Espluga, Josep
name: Lehtonen, Markku
name: Nokkala, Terhi
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: This deliverable on task 4.1 establishes the baseline of the collective competences for sustainability in our schools and universities, twelve demonstration sites from Finland, Portugal, Romania and Spain. Collective competences can be defined as the set of enabling and constraining features that condition the capacity of a community or an organisation to function in a manner that fosters sustainable development and to prepare younger generations for behaviours that advance such an objective.We have distinguished three types of collective competences:- Regulative competences (external to the organisation in question): Deriving from written rules (laws, regulations) that stipulate on the ways in which sustainable development is to be considered and promoted – and by whom.- Normative competences (internal to the organisation): Norms and values reflected and institutionalised in the organisation’s own strategies, programmes of action, plans, guidelines, result agreements concluded with authorities at different levels of governance, etc.- Cultural-cognitive competences: related to the internalisation of the regulative and normative competences as taken-for-granted social norms of normal and acceptable behaviours; translation of regulative and normative competences into the organisation’s operating culture, daily routines, habits, and practices.This assessment, conducted through documentary analysis and selected interviews and workshops with key actors, has allowed us to identify enabling and constraining institutional factors (e.g., local, regional, and national-level policies) that condition the implementation and success of the measures designed to foster sustainable development in our educational organisations.The analysis was carried out at the twelve ECF4CLIM demonstration sites: a school of basic education, a high school, and a university in each of the four countries participating in the study (Finland, Portugal, Romania, and Spain).The analysis shows that at all our demonstration sites there is a clear tension between the regulatory and normative competences on the one hand and the cultural-cognitive competences on the other. Such tension is to be expected, because one thing is what the educational establishment proposes and another what it achieves in practice. But the analysis conducted here also allowed us to better identify and specify the aspects in which “theory and practice” coincide and where they diverge.A) Regulative competences: Regulative competences in our schools of basic education and high schools:

At our schools of basic education, a series of general (education) laws establish the basic curriculum and its contents. In Finland and Portugal, municipalities and schools can introduce local adaptations. In Spain, the regions can define 40%-50% of the curriculum contents. In all the countries, teachers have significant freedom to decide whether and how to integrate sustainability in their teaching. They sometimes can follow the curriculum sustainability contents, or go beyond the minimum requirements. It seems that the teachers have greater freedom to define teaching contents in the area of sustainability than in other, curriculum-based teaching.In all four countries, sustainability is to be integrated in the curriculum in a transversal way. However, especially in Portugal and Romania, specific mandatory or optional courses on sustainability (citizenship, environmental education) are provided. In addition, training actions are also provided for teachers on topics of sustainability, climate change, and the environment.In Finland, schools are run by the municipality. The director of the school is a person hired by the municipality. Each municipality organises action plans for schools, including some related to sustainability. In Portugal, schools depend on the municipalities and the Ministry of Education – an arrangement which leaves for the school management little room to decide on organisational aspects. In Spain, the school council has the main responsibility for integrating innovative projects related to sustainability, with the support of the management team or the school principal.In all four countries, our schools have subcontracted certain key services vital for sustainability (maintenance, food, waste collection, etc.). These services are financed by the central or regional government, and the service agreements with companies are negotiated and concluded by the municipalities. The municipality therefore play a key role in most cases, except in Spain, where the regional government is the key player. In Romania, also the country-level inspection services are important.

However, the coordination of schools with other actors in the community is scarce. The Finnish participants pointed out time limitations as a major obstacle to coordination. In Spain, although the law requires collaboration, in practice this is not something that occurs very often.In most cases, no dedicated funding is available for the implementation of sustainability measures in our schools or for joining projects that promote these measures. Teachers participate in projects mainly on a voluntary basis. Training activities are available for teachers, but usually time constraints limit the attractiveness of such training. Sometimes municipalities (Finland, Portugal), regions (Spain), and the national ministry (Romania, Portugal) provide education resources on sustainability both to teachers and to students.Regarding the content of the regulative competences, in Finland the social dimension of sustainability is emphasised, although also the other dimensions are considered. In Portugal and in Spain, the social and the environmental dimensions are given most attention, whereas in Romania, the curriculum prioritises the environmental dimension over the social and economic ones. The economic dimension figures the least prominently in all four countries. Regulative competences in our universities:

All four analysed universities have a high degree of autonomy to decide how to organise the studies and, therefore, whether and how to include sustainability teaching and activities. In consequence, at our universities, each teacher has the power to decide how, if at all, to address these topics. Both the leadership of the universities (rectorates and collective decision-making bodies) as well as the teaching units and professors can include sustainability issues in their teaching and in the day-to-day operation of their departments.None of the analysed universities seems to have allocated dedicated resources for promoting sustainability. Each university can divert economic and human resources from existing other activities to sustainability issues or to innovation projects related with this topic.At all four universities, there are criteria to introduce elements of sustainability in teaching and in the mission of the organisations, mainly from an environmental and technical perspective. Only in Finland is there a clear willingness to include the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of sustainability (through the concept of planetary wellbeing).

B) Normative competences Normative competences at our schools of basic education and high schools:The internal organisation of responsibilities for sustainability differs considerably from one school to another. In some cases (such as in the Finnish school – Juhannuskylän koulu where a teacher has been nominated as the “contact person of sustainable future”, and is a member of the school management team), the teachers are well organised to promote actions for sustainability. In others (such as Romania Nicolae Balcescu school and Spain CEIP Mozart) sustainability teaching is left for the initiative of each teacher. In Portugal and Spain, the analysed schools (Escola EB 123 da Bobadela and CEIP Mozart) belong to the Eco-schools’ international network, a voluntary programme, which guarantees that some teachers will dedicate efforts to sustainability. There was a general consensus among the participants of our sample schools that the commitment of the school leadership is vital for the success of sustainability efforts. Decisions concerning infrastructure and services, such as energy, water, waste, etc., usually depend on external actors such as companies providing these services, or the local municipality (in Spain, the regional authority).In the four high schools analysed, teachers have considerable autonomy to decide on sustainability teaching. It is easier to introduce this topic in extracurricular activities than in the regular teaching. In the analysed high schools of Finland and Spain, every teacher is responsible for her/his own teaching and can decide teaching objectives and methods within the limits of the national curriculum. In Portugal, the educational programmes do not impose obligations upon the teachers; they only give general orientations and define the goals to be achieved in the subsequent years. In the Romanian high school (Iulia Zamfirescu), the autonomy of the teacher is greater in sustainability-related than in the regular courses.Most schools have not allocated financial or human resources to carry out actions for sustainability. The Romanian basic and high school (Nicolae Balcescu and Iulia Zamfirescu) can introduce extra courses on sustainability with funding from a state programme. However, for the majority of our schools’ sustainability-related services depend on external entities (regional governments, municipalities, NGOs, subcontractors, etc.). In most of our case studies, sustainability activities imply an additional effort from teachers, who are usually not compensated for these extra activities. The only exception seems to be the Finnish case, where the schoolteachers participating in the ‘Sustainable future team’ have a number of hours per year to devote to sustainability activities.In the schools of basic education of our case studies sample, the contents of the competences depend on whether there is any specific subject on sustainability. In the Finnish school (Juhannuskylän koulu) no such subject has been specified. In the Portuguese school, the compulsory subject "Citizenship and development" addresses sustainability issues. In the Romanian ones, an optional subject on "Ecological and environmental education" is provided, while in the Spanish one sustainability is a transversal topic cutting across the general curriculum. The same goes for the high schools, with the difference that in the Finnish case-study the official curriculum for the upper secondary school includes a variety of sustainability issues, and some additional local courses are available. In Portugal, “Citizenship and development” is taught also in the secondary schools. In Romania, the Iulia Zamfirescu school has a subject on “Ecological education”, whereas in the Spanish IES Ítaca sustainability is a transversal topic in the curriculum (by law).

 Normative competences at our universities:All four analysed universities have organisational structures and strategic plans devoted to sustainability. These plans are coordinated by an internal section or division of the university management, and mainly focus on the environmental performance in the operation of the buildings and of the campus, and on achieving cost savings (in energy and water consumption, waste management, etc.). The social dimension of sustainability generally receives less attention. Most people in charge of sustainability belong to the technical staff. Only in the Finnish case (University of Jyväskylä) is there a “Sustainable and responsible development team” formed by professors and experts from various faculties, to advise and inform the university sustainability policies and curriculum work.All four analysed universities have delegated many of their services to external companies (maintenance, cleaning services, food services, waste collection, etc.), which reduces the margin of manoeuvre of the university to improve the environmental performance and sustainability in the campus. Renegotiation of the service agreements is usually only possible once the agreement expires.

In all our four universities, the teachers have lot of autonomy on whether, what and how to teach on sustainable development, provided that the approach complies with the educational objectives declared in the initial design of the course approved by the university and supervised by the quality agencies.In all four universities the resources available to promote sustainability stem from regular budgets. Therefore, the universities are free to prioritise their various activities at will. Introducing new sustainability-related courses and activities faces the constraint of requiring a reallocation of resources – in practice, reducing the resources from the existing and often well-established courses and activities. Institutional inertia therefore tends to keep sustainability as a lower-priority topic.The importance given to sustainability varies across universities. Those in the case-studies of Finland and Portugal seem to give a higher priority for sustainability in all its dimensions, proposing ways to measure progress and acting in various dimensions (structural, organisational, curricular contents, etc.). The analysed universities in Romania (Pitesti) and Spain (UAB) appear to give lower priority to the subject as a whole, relying on voluntary action, although sustainability is paid at least lip service in the university plans.

C) Cultural-cognitive competences:- Cultural-cognitive competences in our Schools of basic education and High schools:In the Schools of basic education of our sample, students expressed some difficulties in understanding the concept of sustainability (EB 123 da Bobadela, in Portugal), yet they also pointed to the gap between words and action (EB 123 da Bobadela in Portugal, and CEIP Mozart in Spain). Such discrepancies included those between what is taught at school and the daily practices of families (Portuguese case-study) and the community at large (Romanian case study). Students regretted that the rules of good environmental behaviour are breached in the day-to-day life, both by students and by teachers: the lights are not turned off, the waste is not adequately sorted, etc. (Spanish case-study). The students also feel that people are often indifferent in relation to sustainability, but they also recognise some good practices for example by NGOs.Although these basic and high schools have introduced elements of sustainability, they have done so in a very partial and piecemeal way. Only the natural science subjects treat sustainability in a more transversal way, whereas in the other subjects sustainability has almost no place whatsoever (Portuguese and Romanian case-studies). It is left to the teacher's initiative to incorporate optional courses on sustainable development, which nevertheless often remain as isolated one-off exercises without continuity (Romanian case-studies). Lack of the time hinders collaboration and coordination among teachers as well as teacher participation in voluntary sustainability activities (Spain).

Our students feel that they have learned many things about sustainability (especially concerning the environmental dimension, including energy saving, recycling, etc.), but they perceive that students in higher grades tend to adopt and imitate the unsustainable habits of adults (Romanian case-study). Our students find difficult encourage behaviour change at school, and stress the importance of constant good examples (Portuguese case study). However, although they want to be more sustainable, our students perceive that there are structural barriers that prevent them from doing so, such as long communing distances, lack of resources, laws, etc. (Spanish case-study), not only at school level, but also at municipality level (Portugal). The links between school and the local society are key for improving sustainability. Lack of resources and infrastructures (green spaces, containers, public transport, bike lanes, buildings’ quality, etc.) were widely mentioned as key obstacles to sustainability (except in our Finish case-study).

In the High schools of our sample, students lack understanding of sustainability, associating the concept mostly with environmental aspects (Portuguese and Romanian case studies), and showing little interest in the other dimensions. Our teachers instead have a broad vision (Portuguese case-study). Some high-school students find it embarrassing to talk about sustainability to peers (Finnish case-study), consider that they have limited possibilities to influence global sustainability through small individual actions (Portuguese and Finnish case-studies), and underline the difficulties to change daily behaviours (Romanian case-study). Many students argue that in society, bad examples abound, individualism predominates over collective values, and consumerism is deeply rooted in the people’s minds (Romanian case-study). Our teachers feel also frustrated because other teachers, students and staff do not behave in an environmentally respectful manner (recycling, etc.). The lack of time to participate in extracurricular activities among students and lack of time for collaboration among teachers are further barriers to sustainability (Finnish case-study).In all our four case-study countries, despite good intentions, lack of time and other resources discourages sustainability activities. It is perceived that sustainability may well be a priority in the school strategies and plans, but does not receive the same priority in actual resource allocation. Moreover, students in Romania (Iulia Zamfirescu high school) underlined the importance of maintaining the attractiveness (job opportunities, enjoyable living environment) of the local community, in order to ensure sustainability.

 Cultural-cognitive competences at our universities:Sustainability remains a poorly-defined and vague concept, and students are not motivated to participate in sustainability activities that are not included in the course schedule (University of Jyväskylä case-study, in Finland). Students are interested in sustainability, but the faculty does not provide incentives to debate and action in this area (UAB Spanish case-study).The university students of our sample considered that sustainability is usually approached in a narrow way, sometimes reduced to things like recycling (Finnish case-study). Students tend to consider sustainability as an important topic, which nevertheless is seldom integrated in university courses or subject syllabi, and on which they lack knowledge – including knowledge about what if anything the university is doing on the subject (Spanish case-study). Students highlighted the gaps between the university plans and the actual practices. The Romanian students (of the case-study of the University of Pitesti) found the legislative frameworks as too complex and in contradiction with real-life constraints faced by the citizens.These university students blamed the hegemonic way of life and the economic growth philosophy promoted by advertising and the media as working against sustainability objectives, but believed that small actions by individuals (students) can make a difference and help move towards sustainability (Romanian case-study). Students in Finland expressed frustration at the fact that sustainability is not always a norm of action manifested in the daily practices at the university (Jyväskylä case-study). The university should lead by example, the students considered, but too many contradictions exist between what it proposes and what it practices. The resistance of the universities to change actually sets a bad example and reduces the effectiveness of education for sustainability (Romanian case-study).Out teachers considered that plenty of as such necessary rules and plans had been created during the past decades to foster sustainable development, but that it was hard to mobilise the students for more profound changes (Spanish case-study). Both the teachers and the students of the Spanish case thought that the university should motivate students to act for global environmental causes and better organisation, attention to collective action, and institutional change was needed. At the same time, both students and teachers think that the tendency of public information campaigns for sustainability to put the blame on individuals is counterproductive (Spanish case-study). Finally, the poor quality of the school and municipal infrastructure was mentioned by the university students and teachers as a major shortcoming and obstacle (e.g., building insulation, transport infrastructure) in all four university case-studies but in the Finnish case.