Inaugural meeting of ACUP working group on Education for Sustainable Development

This group is made up of academic vice-rectors, vice-rectors responsible for cooperation for development, and technical staff, and its aim is to work towards the institutionalization of ESD in the ACUP universities. More specifically it sets out to build up a vision of ESD common to the whole Catalan university system, help create structures for introducing it at different levels, generate incentives and recognition systems, design a common teaching approach and establish a system of indicators to measure its impact.

In this first meeting of the working group different ESD concepts and traditions were analysed and discussed, and the universities that make up ACUP shared their experiences in order to identify potential areas for collaboration. With this in mind the discussion focused on the results of the inter-university seminars led by the FAS in collaboration with the ACUP since 2014-2015, in which lecturers from the different Catalan public universities and representatives from social entities, university cooperation offices and public administration have defined four avenues for intervention and several lines of work, with the ultimate aim of integrating ESD in the Catalan public universities. The results of the session were highly encouraging, as all the universities contributed to drawing up a road map towards the official institutionalization of ESD in the Catalan public universities.

This initiative falls within the project Education for Sustainable Development at University (ESDU), which is led by FAS with the collaboration of ACUP and funded by Barcelona City Council.