Science-Society Interfaces - Transforming Universities

With the current imperatives around social justice and ecological disruption, the key challenge can be seen in the question of how to achieve vital changes, not whether. This question spills into a range of areas, and in an educational setting refers also to motivating stakeholders for engaging in sustainable change. The prospects of profound changes are more and more often discussed in terms of bottom-up social, cultural and institutional transformations, rather than top-down structured (technological) transitions. Crucially, the question of unsustainability is systemic, i.e. interwoven with our broadly understood socio-economic structures, beliefs, everyday decision and practices, to name just a few pieces of the puzzle. In tracking the roots of the current challenges, universities seem particularly relevant in terms of their transformative potential as they shape societal development via outreach and educating future generations. Seeing higher education among the major driving forces for transformations, we focus on transformative universities and their role in providing science-society interfaces and further supporting related participation processes. We highlight the difference between a transitory and a transformative approach to sustainable higher education. Herein, we devote special attention to university-based Regional Centres of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development (RCEs), which we describe as learning communities encouraging different actors to explore change. Referring to transformative education, we emphasize the potential of RCEs to foster more sustainability-oriented pedagogic approaches such as experienced based learning and service learning.