Toward Identifying Sustainability Leadership Competencies: Insights from Mapping a Graduate Sustainability Education Curriculum

Graduate sustainability programs are tasked with educating and preparing the next generation of leaders to address the causes and effects of global climate change. As the urgency of addressing sustainability challenges like climate change has grown, including through higher education sustainability education, so has the attention on the competencies students ought to master to become sustainability leaders. Yet little is known about which sustainability leadership competencies are critical to bring about change or how curricula are addressing them. We used course descriptions from the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, to identify the sustainability leadership competencies targeted across its historically successful graduate curriculum, along with faculty members’ associated cognitive processing expectations following Bloom’s Taxonomy. The programs’ courses varied in the extent to which they addressed ten leadership competencies but were consistent in terms of associated cognitive processing expectations. We recommend that other sustainability education programs similarly examine their curricula and ensure that students regardless of their specializations have the opportunity to graduate with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to affect change.