Abstract:

This has been acknowledged that the resource extinction is a significant issue for the sustainability of global societies. Future scenarios foresee an increasing societal and environmental burdens on future generations. The topicality of environmental unsustainability has been acknowledged in a number of strategic international and local documents, like, the Global Action Plan, and the UNECE Strategy of Education for Sustainable Development. The authors suggest an action research as a viable strategy for engaging the students in higher education for developing interdisciplinary knowledge, values and competencies in order to become system thinkers and facilitators of transformations in their local communities. The authors highlight the challenges of higher education to develop students’ competencies to understand diverse contexts by moving beyond the traditional discipline boundaries, working in trans disciplinary heterogeneous teams and accommodating individual perspectives and meanings while maintaining group's identity in conjunction with the evolution of personal and community behaviors. A personal ability to understand and to integrate a broader understanding of unsustainability as a current state of being helps them to develop their competencies to construct their own and society’s future in the context of epistemological pluralism.

Keywords:

Sustainable resource governance, interdisciplinarity, system thinking.