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A BIBLIOMETRIC REVIEW OF EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
RESEARCH LANDSCAPE FROM 1991 TO 2021
Preprint · June 2023
DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/q4tza
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A BIBLIOMETRIC REVIEW OF EDUCATION FOR
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH
LANDSCAPE FROM 1991 TO 2021
Ngoc-Thang B. Le1; Manh-Tung Ho1,2,3*
1. Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Oita, Japan, 874-8577
2. Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Phenikaa University, Yen Nghia Ward, Ha Dong
District, Hanoi, 100000
3. Institute of Philosophy, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, 59 Lang Ha Street, Ba Dinh
District, Hanoi, 100000
*Correspondence: Manh-Tung Ho (tung.homanh@phenikaa-uni.edu.vn)
Abstract
This paper sought to understand the research landscape of education for sustainable
development (ESD) globally from 1991 to 2021. Applying bibliometric analysis on 632 papers
indexed in the Web of Science database, we examined the structure of research on ESD. While
productivity has peaked in recent years, the impact of the articles in this field remains relatively
medium. The four most impactful publishing journals are Sustainability, Journal of Cleaner
Production, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, and Environmental
Education Research. We find research in ESD is still dominated by Western European authors,
although collaboration with Asia, South Africa, North and South America are recorded to be on
the rise. The bibliometric analysis and a comprehensive review help synthesize key findings
regarding students’ attitudes and perceptions toward ESD, ESD in higher education, and
competency-based education. Importantly, this study identifies the shift from content-based
education toward interactive and participatory style of pedagogy for successful ESD integration at
all levels of education. There are several emerging research themes such as policy impacts and
ESD programs analyses, which can provide high-value actionable insights for both educators and
policymakers. The review brings into sharp relief an overarching sense of positivity regarding
sustainability education among the students, yet equally, they feel a lack of concreteness and
practicality in the current curriculum.
Key words: Education for sustainable development, sustainability competency, student
perception of ESD, participatory pedagogical approach, ESD in higher education
1. Introduction
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been relevant in the literature as an
innovative educational agenda to promote the learning and practice of sustainable development.
Over a decade ago, Walter (2010) discussed how the integration of ESD into educational programs
had brought various values to the pedagogical process in Western Europe. By connecting
sustainability knowledge with specialized education in England, engineers, architects, and other
professionals would consider the aspect of sustainability in construction and renovation. Germany,
being one of the most active countries in integrating ESD into its curriculum, went beyond the
teaching of sustainable development in specialized education major to management-oriented and
business study. In Finland, Sweden, and Poland, sustainability inclusion in engineering had given
way to the design of sustainable production, notably NOKIA’s manufacturing chain in Finland
and Volvo- Scania’s environment-friendly cars (Walter, 2010). In Japan, ESD was strongly
promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT)
(Nomura & Abe, 2010). MEXT revised the curriculum to implement ESD-related topics into
education systems while providing funds for UNESCO to expand the practice of ESD to the AsiaPacific region. Although China didn’t have any national education program that placed ESD at its
core, the concept underwent a culturalized process, integrating Chinese core educational values to
fit into the concepts of ESD (Müller et al., 2021; Zhou & Lee, 2022).
On the other hand, while the agenda was promoted as an innovative educational goal, its
state of research and implementation approach remains limited (Kopnina, 2012, 2020; Nagata,
2017). As research is an essential source of references for educational institutions and government
officials to plan for ESD practice at all levels of education, this paper will analyze the ESD research
landscape from 1991 to 2021. Utilizing bibliometric data on the ESD research landscape, we will
provide a bibliometric and comprehensive thematic review. By the end of the study, the paper will
provide insights into the current research state and future direction for ESD-theme research,
through which educators and policymakers can have a better understanding of ESD before
implementing new activities.
The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 will present a brief description of the
ESD agenda proposed by the United Nations, and how our study differs from previous studies with
similar review approaches. Section 3 will describe how we collected and processed the
bibliometric data on the ESD research. Section 4 will show the overview of the ESD research
landscape, publisher and references’ sources, the authors’ characteristics, and a general thematic
review. Section 5 will elaborate on the findings of section 4, providing comprehensive thematic
reviews on four themes, namely motor, basic, niche, and emerging/declining. Section 6 will
conclude the paper with research limitations and significant remarks.
2. Literature review
2.1. Education for Sustainable Development
Simply put, ESD is defined as the collective transformation of education for educators to
work toward a sustainable society. Tracing back its history, ESDs was first proposed by Japan at
the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. UNESCO took the leading position in
expanding the concept and development framework for ESD, through its program “UN Decade of
Education for Sustainable Development (DESD)” from 2005 to 2014 and “Global Action Program
on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) (GAP)” from 2015 to 2019. Both programs were
founded based on the principle that education is one of the most essential elements for promoting
sustainable development’s pathway.
While the concept of sustainable society is ambiguous, the transformation pathways for
ESD have been defined by UNESCO in the ESD for 2030 roadmap (UNESCO, 2020). ESD for
2030 is based on three dimensions: (1) Cognitive learning - Explore innovative ideas and
alternative solutions to understand sustainability challenges and their complex interconnections
(2) Social and emotional learning - Develop sustainable fundamental beliefs and pro-sustainability
competencies; and foster empathy and compassion for the people and the environment (3)
Behavioral learning – Aware of effective and responsible actions towards a more peaceful and
sustainable society at the local, national, and global levels (UNESCO, 2019, 2020). The three
dimensions are at the core of not only the ESD but general awareness of the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), which will be discussed later. To achieve such goals, UNESCO
proposed three reflections (UNESCO, 2020). Firstly, learners need to recognize the significance
of individuals when it comes to transformative action. In the course of pursuing ESD, learners
must understand that their actions collectively will bring great changes to maintain a sustainable
society. Secondly, there are systemic issues in the societal structure that contributes to
unsustainable development, namely bad governance, perpetual poverty, climate change, etc. Not
only does ESD need to emphasize the understanding of these issues, but it also calls for learners
to come up with alternatives to adjust the societal structures. Finally, while the role of technology
in maintaining a sustainable society is undeniable, relying on technological advancement for
solving sustainability challenges is dangerously naïve. Critical thinking and pro-sustainability
competencies must remain the main objective of ESD learners.
2.2. Review on Education for Sustainable development
Bibliometric review is a powerful tool to understand the research state of a field. It
highlights the structural interests of the researchers and provides an insight into the current
development of a field. Machado and Davim (2022) applied the bibliometric approach to answer
three questions with regard to higher education for sustainability, identifying the main themes of
research, the most contributing researchers, and the countries with dominant outputs. In this study,
bibliometric data was collected from the Scopus database, and the results were visualized with
VOS viewer and Bibliometrix R package. Another study by Côrtes and Rodrigues (2016) used
the bibliometric approach to understand the research trend of education for sustainability. The
review included international productivity of research on education for sustainability, productive
countries, and methods that were used to conduct studies in this field.
Another review method to grasp an understanding of a research landscape is systematic
review. This method differs as the review is conducted only a number of papers that carefully
match the criteria and scope of the research questions. Bascopé et al. (2019) wrote a systematic
review on the ESD for early children development (ECD). With the objective to understand
pedagogical approaches and frameworks behind them, the paper examined a total of 56 articles,
through which the authors identified the cornerstones for the ESD activities integration and
suggested suitable pedagogical approaches for ESD. Wu and Shen (2016) utilized the systematic
approach to write a review on higher education for sustainable development (HESD) during the
UN’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD). The research systematically
collected articles from 4 large databases (EBSCO, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, Emerald) through
three synonymous keywords: “education for sustainability”, “education for sustainable
development”, and “sustainability education”. As a result, the paper presented a chronological
mapping of theme development and detailed discussion in main themes, notably sustainability and
the environment in higher education, curriculum, and teaching sustainability.
With a similar approach, our study sought to update the development progress of the ESD
research landscape up until 2021. Employing the pre-established bibliometric reviewing structure,
this study will seek to analyze notable bibliometric characteristics of the ESD research landscape
to understand the development of the field. Furthermore, our study will differ from other
bibliometric reviews by providing an insight into what the authors are researching, how they
conduct the studies, and what outcome we can take from those studies.
3. Methodology
For this bibliometric review, we have selected Web of Science database for its indexing
reliability and convenient data exporting function. The data collection process is described in table
1:
Step
Query
Results
#1
“Education for sustainable development” (title)
1067
#2
“Education for sustainable development” (1989- 1051
2021)
#3
“Education for sustainable development” (1989- 726
2021), Refined by Article
#4
“Education for sustainable development” (1989- 632
2021), Refined by Article, English.
Table 1: Search and filter query on Web of Science
In the searching process, “Education for sustainable development” was the main keyword to yield
as many results as possible while keeping the results relatively relevant to the research theme.
From the initial 1067 articles, the results were refined through the publication year for a complete
and accurate comparison of scientific productivity in the examined period. Finally, only papers
with article as document type, and English as language were included in the dataset. This was to
synchronize the bibliometric data collected from the articles, as other forms of publication might
be lacking abstracts, keywords, and so on. We searched the keyword in only the title, as otherwise
collected research papers won’t match closely to this paper’s objective, for instance, study on
Education with Sustainable development in the title or keyword.
In the next step, we applied bibliometric analysis with bibliometrix, an open-source package in R.
The package was developed by Aria and Cuccurullo (2017) that allowed non-coding researchers
to use its interface biblioshiny with multiple pre-programmed analyzing functions. Notable
functions include analysis of overview, sources, authors, and documents. The package also offers
more complex analyzing functions, which are conceptual, intellectual, and social structure analysis.
The visualization and interpretation of the results from using bibliometrix package are presented
in the following section.
4. Result
4.1. Overview
Descriptive data
Description
Results
MAIN INFORMATION ABOUT DATA
Timespan
1991:2021
Sources (Journals, Books, etc)
227
Documents
632
Average
years
from
5.82
publication
Average
citations
per
13.86
Average citations per year per
2.015
documents
doc
References
22489
DOCUMENT TYPES
article
473
article; book chapter
141
article; proceedings paper
18
DOCUMENT CONTENTS
Keywords Plus (ID)
579
Author's Keywords (DE)
1474
AUTHORS
Authors
1454
Author Appearances
1718
Authors of single-authored
140
documents
Authors
of
multi-authored
1314
documents
AUTHORS COLLABORATION
Single-authored documents
160
Documents per Author
0.435
Authors per Document
2.3
Co-Authors per Documents
2.72
Collaboration Index
2.78
Table 2. Description of the dataset
Overall, there are 632 articles examined in this study, published between 1991 and 2021.
The average years from publication are 5.82, while the average number of citations per document
is 13.86. In total, there are 1454 authors contributing to the publications in the ESD field. Of the
1454 authors, 140 people are the sole contributors, accounting for approximately 9.63% of the
total authors. The documents per author’s rate is 0.435 while the authors per document’s rate is
2.3. In other words, on average in this field, an author writes 0.424 paper while one publication is
written by 2.3 authors. The collaboration index of 2.78 is calculated by dividing the total number
of authors by the total number of documents in the multi-authored category, which suggests that
one paper on the ESD topics is on average the collaborated effort of 2-3 authors. The metrics are
in accordance with the co-authors per document’s rate (2.3) as well.
Annual Scientific Production
Figure 1. Annual Scientific Production of ESD research landscape
The first article on the field of ESD was published in 1991. There were three periods when
scientific productivity peaked: 2007-2009, 2011-2016, and 2018-2020. The annual growth rate is
19.84%. The vast majority of the publication is skewed to the right, suggesting that while the
concept of this field has long been proposed, the research is receiving attention in the recent 15
years. The scientific productivity reached its highest in 2019, with 95 publications.
Average article citations per year
Figure 2. Average article citations of the ESD research landscape
From figure 2, we can see that the publications on the ESD research landscape have vastly
fluctuated citations over the years. The highest records are respectively 4.4, 3.8, and 5 in 2012,
2013, and 2015. Comparing with the highly skewed scientific production output of figure 1, we
can presume that while the number of ESD-themed papers have increased, the impact of the articles
in this field remains relatively medium.
Three-fields plot
Figure 3: Three-fields plot for countries (middle), sources (left), and cited sources (right)
The three-field plot is based on the concept of interactive Sankey diagram (Riehmann et
al., 2005), which allows users to trace quantitative flow across the graph and have a broad
observation of complex flows. In this three-field plot, the top 10 of the authors’ countries, sources
of the articles, and sources of the cited materials are displayed to indicate the flow of ESD-theme
research papers from references to publications. A large volume of papers is published in
Sustainability, Journal of Cleaner Production, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher
Education, and Environmental Education Research. These publishers are also the main sources of
references for ESD-themed research papers. Regarding authors’ countries, we can see a large
proportion of papers are written by European researchers. Further insights into authors' and sources’
characteristics will be discussed in the following sections.
4.2. Publisher and References’ sources
Top journals for article publication
Figure 4. Top journals for publication in the ESD research landscape
Figure 4 represents the top 20 journals with most articles from the ESD research landscape.
Sustainability, an open-access journal, accounts for the largest proportion of papers in this field at
120 publications. The following journals with substantial numbers of publications are
Environmental Education Research (55), International Journal of Sustainability in Higher
Education (39), and Journal of Cleaner Production (32).
Figure 5. Cumulative number of publications in the top 4 journals from 1991 to 2021
From the cumulative chart of publications in the top 4 journals with the highest ESD
research papers, we can see the exponential growth of publications to Sustainability from 2018.
Top journal for references
Figure 6. Top journals for references of ESD research papers
As mentioned in the overview, Sustainability (486), Environmental Education Research
(1109), International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education (763), and Journal of Cleaner
Production (873) are not only the most popular journals for publication but also foundation
journals for references in ESD research landscape.
Top cited publications
Paper
Name and DOI
Total
TC per
Citations
Year
LAMBRECHTS W, The integration of competences 208
2013,
J
20.8
CLEAN for sustainable development in
PROD
higher education: an analysis of
bachelor
programs
in
management
10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.12.034
MOGENSEN
2010,
F, The action competence approach 195
15
ENVIRON and the ‘new’ discourses of
EDUC RES
education
for
sustainable
development, competence and
quality criteria
10.1080/13504620903504032
KARATZOGLOU
An in-depth literature review of 193
B, 2013, J CLEAN the
PROD
evolving
roles
19.3
and
contributions of universities to
Education
for
Sustainable
Development
10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.07.043
KOPNINA H, 2012, Education
ENVIRON
RES
for
sustainable 186
EDUC development (ESD): the turn
away from ‘environment’ in
environmental education?
10.1080/13504622.2012.658028
16.9091
BARTH M, 2012, J Academic staff development as a 174
CLEAN PROD
15.8182
catalyst for curriculum change
towards education for sustainable
development:
an
output
perspective
10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.12.011
CEBRIAN G, 2015, Competencies in Education for 167
SUSTAINABILITY- Sustainable
20.875
Development:
Exploring the Student Teachers’
BASEL
Views
10.3390/su7032768
ANNAN-DIAB
2017,
INT
MANAG
F, Interdisciplinarity:
Practical 140
23.3333
J approach to advancing education
EDUC- for sustainability and for the
OXF
Sustainable Development Goals
10.1016/j.ijme.2017.03.006
BURMEISTER
M, Education
2012, CHEM EDUC Development
RES PRACT
for
Sustainable 139
(ESD)
12.6364
and
chemistry education
10.1039/c1rp90060a
RAMOS TB, 2015, J Experiences
CLEAN PROD
from
the 134
16.75
implementation of sustainable
development in higher education
institutions:
Management
Environmental
for
Sustainable
Universities
10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.05.110
HUCKLE J, 2015, The UN Decade of Education for 127
ENVIRON
RES
EDUC Sustainable
Development:
business as usual in the end
10.1080/13504622.2015.1011084
15.875
BOEVE-DE PAUW The Effectiveness of Education 123
J,
15.375
2015, for sustainable Development
SUSTAINABILITY- 10.3390/su71115693
BASEL
LEAL W, 2015, INT The future we want: Key issues on 121
15.125
J SUST HIGHER ED sustainable development in higher
education after Rio and the UN
decade
of
education
for
sustainable development
10.1108/IJSHE-03-2014-0036
WIEK
A,
2016, Operationalizing
ROUT INT HANDB
in
Higher
Competencies 112
Education
16
for
Sustainable Development
NA
ADOMSSENT
2014,
J
M, Emerging areas in research on 108
12
CLEAN higher education for sustainable
PROD
development
–
education,
management
sustainable
consumption and perspectives
from Central and Eastern Europe
10.1016/j.jclepro.2013.09.045
AZEITEIRO
2015,
J
UM, Education
for
sustainable 102
12.75
CLEAN development through e-learning
PROD
in higher education: experiences
from Portugal
10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.11.056
COTTON D, 2009, Revolutions
and
STUD HIGH EDUC
education
solutions:
second‐best 94
for
sustainable development in higher
education
10.1080/03075070802641552
6.7143
BEYNAGHI
2016,
J
A, Future sustainability scenarios for 94
13.4286
CLEAN universities: moving beyond the
PROD
United
Nations
Education
Decade
for
of
Sustainable
Development
10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.10.117
YUAN XL, 2013, J A critical assessment of the 92
CLEAN PROD
9.2
Higher Education For Sustainable
Development
from
students'
perspectives – a Chinese study
10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.10.041
ALAM GM, 2009, The
SCI RES ESSAYS
role
of
science
and 86
6.1429
technology education at network
age population for sustainable
development
through
of
human
Bangladesh
resource
advancement
NA
FADEEVA Z, 2010, Higher education for today and 80
SUSTAIN SCI
6.1538
tomorrow: university appraisal
for diversity, innovation and
change
towards
sustainable
development
10.1007/s11625-010-0106-0
Table 3. Articles with most citations
Table 3 lists 20 articles with the highest total citations. Total citations per year are
calculated by diving total citations by the number of years from the publication date until 2021.
As the most impactful articles in the field, it can be said that the papers are essential for references
to understand the directions of ESD research.
Among those, many discussed the implementation of ESD in a specific country context.
Notably, the countries examined are less developing regions, namely Bangladesh (Alam, 2009),
China (Yuan & Zuo, 2013), and Central and Eastern part of Europe (Adomßent et al., 2014). The
early paper in this group from 2009 highlighted the role of science and technology-based education
for sustainable development in Bangladesh, a developing country with progressing economy. Thus,
it reflects a strong desire for economic development, with education as an essential tool to advance
the workforce capacity in the network age. Sustainable development in this context emphasized
strongly the economic and social pillars of sustainable development. The next paper evaluates
students’ awareness and perceptions of ESD (Yuan & Zuo, 2013) in the context of the Chinese
education system. The findings confirmed a strong sense of environmental orientation toward
sustainability, meaning students were prioritizing environmental aspects of sustainability over
other pillars. In addition, the current transformation to incorporate sustainable development in
Chinese universities was approached through a “top-down” notion, requiring changes from the
university boards and governmental initiatives rather than from the students or staffs. Therefore,
the bottom-up approach from students and university staffs was encouraged to address all the
stakeholders in the educational system. In the Central and Eastern parts of Europe, Adomßent et
al. (2014) focused on three ESD fields that the authors considered to be “highly relevant” emerging
areas: Management education for sustainable development, sustainable consumption in higher
education institutions, and higher education for sustainable development. In this special issue, the
authors completed a comprehensive thematic review on the critical areas that previously have not
received much attention. The important implications included prioritizing strategies for sustainable
organizational transformation, assessing learning outcomes, and considering various geographical,
political, and cultural settings for higher education for sustainable development.
One important milestone of the ESD development is the UN Decade of Education for
Sustainable Development (DESD). As the program was implemented from 2005 to 2014, many
papers after 2014 reflected on the effectiveness of DESD. Leal Filho et al. (2015) discussed the
success that DESD has gained in reaching for sustainable development with an emphasis on higher
education. Leah Filho et al. (2015) emphasized the proposal to include three additional pillars of
sustainable development, namely, the cultural, the political (institutional), and the spiritual. A
common point of these pillars is the focus on human values, which signifies a shift toward a more
normative approach rather than basing SD solely on quantifiable indicators of the pre-Rio era.
Thus, the authors highlighted the evolved conception of ESD into a lifelong process, i.e., a means
to an end (of achieving a better quality of life), rather than an end in itself such as achieving
academic or vocational qualifications. Importantly, Leal Filho et al. identify key practical actions
to keep up the progress of the DESD, including basic competency development of understanding
the complexity of SD, the creation of accessible ESD knowledge-sharing platforms, or the issue
of funding for ESD projects and initiatives, etc. To prepare for the next ESD agenda after DESD,
Beynaghi et al. (2016) analyzed the results of sustainable development integration at universities
and thus predict the orientation they would take in the period after the DESD, which would have
been the Global Action Program on Education for Sustainable Development (GAP). The authors
found the evolution of the notion of sustainable development and its emergence into a core concern
for higher education (HE), moving from being merely a new attitude in the 1970s and 1980s (phase
1), into being embedded into higher education paradigms through official statements and formal
initiatives (phase 2), to finally morph into phase 3 (HE for SD), where SD starts to become a major
driver of structures and functions of HE.
Another significant strength of these articles is that they provided evidence for ESD
integration through the case study review approach. To document the efforts universities have
made during the DESD, Karatzoglou (2013) systematically reviewed journal articles on ESD in
universities, characterizing them into two objectives: articles that used theoretical frameworks to
analyze the universities’ engagement on a theoretical normative basis or referencing from
published meta-analyses; and articles that presented case studies that are analyzed under such
theoretical framework and thus raised commentary on particular aspects of the implementation.
The paper pointed out the popular research approach where the engagement of HEIs with
sustainability is described in a case study, often in an instructive and resolving light. However, as
the case studies varied in backgrounds, orientation, and target objective, such an approach failed
at synthesizing a constructive knowledge base of the university-sustainability relationship. As a
result, the authors raise these orientations for improving research in the field of ESD: Creation of
rigorous conceptual framework and terminology for the field, application of case-study research,
and the standardization of the publications that provide generalization and adaptability for the
findings in different contexts. This paper succeeded in capturing the characteristics of many casestudy based research that would continue to dominate in publications in the ESD field. Another
paper provided a comprehensive case-study analysis in 33 papers, in which the authors discussed
findings on the implementation of SD in HEIs, stakeholder and ESD, campus operations,
sustainability report and evaluation, changes in curriculum, and examples of ESD approaches.
Interestingly, while the paper has no synthesized conclusion, its high citation impact indicated a
need for researchers to look at a comprehensive case-study review to gain a reference on the field.
4.3. Authors’ characteristics
Top authors
Authors
Articles
GERICKE N
9
LEE JCK
9
KOPNINA H
7
LEAL W
7
SINGER-BRODOWSKI M
7
AZEITEIRO UM
6
EILKS I
6
PAVLOVA M
6
THOMAS I
6
RIECKMANN M
5
BARTH M
4
BROCK A
4
CAEIRO S
4
KNUTSSON B
4
KOLLECK N
4
MACLEAN R
4
OSTMAN L
4
PACE P
4
SPRENGER S
4
SUND P
4
Table 4. Authors with most publications in the ESD research landscape
Figure 7. Top authors’ production over time
Table 4 and figure 7 display the top 20 authors with the highest publication volumes. With
9 publications, GERICKE N and LEE JCK are the most productive authors in this field. An
interesting feature of the publication period is that multiple authors tend to publish the majority of
their papers in the same year, notably LEE JCK with 7 articles in 2009, THOMAS I with 5 articles
in 2015, and CAEIRO S with 3 papers in 2005. Of course, there are exceptions such as SINGERBRODOWSKI M and AZEITEIRO UMO with publications spreading over the years. Overall,
there are not many differences between the top 20 authors in terms of cumulative numbers of
publications.
Top authors by h-index
Figure 8. Author’s local impact by h-index
The h-index is a tool for assessing the cumulative influence of an author's scholarly output
and performance; it compares publications to citations to determine quantity and quality
(Bornmann & Daniel, 2007). GERICKE N was also the author with the highest h-index. His works
examined perception of sustainability in both students and teachers and highlighted the concept of
sustainability consciousness. The following authors with highest h-index were KOPNINA H,
LEAL W, and SINGER-BRODOWSKI M. Kopnina provided a critical view by criticizing and
evaluating the current ESD discourse, arguing that the current concepts of sustainable development
neglected ecological justices for non-human elements while LEAL W covered broad analysis on
ESD agenda, namely reflection on the DESDs, SDGs, and the contents of ESD itself for 2030
sustainable development agenda.
Country scientific production
Table 5 shows the total number of publications by authors’ country, showcasing the top 20
countries
Region
Number
UK
135
GERMANY
126
CHINA
87
SPAIN
87
SWEDEN
78
USA
78
AUSTRALIA
69
PORTUGAL
63
JAPAN
45
CANADA
40
BRAZIL
29
RUSSIA
29
MALAYSIA
26
SOUTH AFRICA
26
AUSTRIA
23
SWITZERLAND
23
BELGIUM
22
SOUTH KOREA
21
UKRAINE
21
NEW ZEALAND
19
Table 5. Total number of ESD publications by country
Figure 9 visualizes the regions with the most authors publishing in the ESD research
landscape. Darker regions represent higher publication numbers, while grey regions represent no
authors in the field. Overall, Europe, North America, and Oceania are the three regions with
dominant scientific outputs. The publications from Asia are mostly concentrated in Japan, China,
Korea, and Russia. In terms of ranking in volume, Europe is dominating the field, holding 9
positions over the top 20 countries and more than half of the publication output. Europe also
accounts for three of the top 5 countries with the highest scientific output.
Figure 9. Map of ESD publication by region
Collaboration network
Country
Articles
Single-
Multiple-
Percentage
country
country
of multiple-
publications
Publications
country
publications
NETHERLANDS
12
7
5
41.67%
NORWAY
8
5
3
37.50%
CHINA
34
22
12
35.29%
MALAYSIA
9
6
3
33.33%
GERMANY
67
46
21
31.34%
AUSTRIA
10
7
3
30.00%
USA
28
20
8
28.57%
KOREA
11
8
3
27.27%
UNITED
60
44
16
26.67%
KINGDOM
AUSTRALIA
38
29
9
23.68%
JAPAN
20
16
4
20.00%
ROMANIA
10
8
2
20.00%
BRAZIL
16
13
3
18.75%
PORTUGAL
16
13
3
18.75%
CANADA
19
16
3
15.79%
SWEDEN
40
35
5
12.50%
SPAIN
34
30
4
11.76%
TURKEY
9
8
1
11.11%
SOUTH AFRICA
12
11
1
8.33%
UKRAINE
8
8
0
0.00%
Table 6. Publications by single-country and multiple-country collaboration
Table 6 represents the collaboration of authors in the top 20 countries with the most
publications, distinguished by their corresponding authors’ countries and publication volumes. In
addition, single-country publications (SCP) and multiple-country publications (MCP) are also
categorized. In terms of international collaboration, Netherlands and Norway have the highest rate
of multiple-country publications at 41.67% and 37.5% while Germany and England have the
highest numbers of multiple-country publications at 21 and 16 articles respectively. This means
that Dutch and Norwegian authors collaborate with the most international researchers qualitatively,
whereas German and English authors have the highest number of publications with international
collaborators. In contrast, Ukraine has the lowest rate and number of multiple-country publications
at 0 percent, meaning their works are entirely written by domestic researchers. The network of
collaboration is visualized in figure 10.
Figure 10. Collaboration network of countries
4.4. Structure review
Cooccurrence map
Figure 11. Co-occurrence map of keyword plus in ESD research landscape
As supported by bibliometrix r package, the occurrence map is based upon the keyword
plus of articles in the ESD research landscape. This is a powerful bibliometric index for content
analysis as it provides insights into the field’s structure (Zhang et al., 2015). As in figure 9,
keywords are represented by nodes, connected through strings, and clustered into different groups
of colors. The sizes of the nodes indicate their frequency, while the strings indicate that the
keywords have appeared altogether in at least one article. The clusters are distinguished through
the Louvain method for communities, grouping items with similar centrality and density
characteristics (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017). A node's centrality is determined by how frequently it
is found on the shortest path between other nodes, indicating its significance in the network while
the quantity of connections a node has is measured by its density. Centrality and density will be
utilized in the later parts to discuss thematic topics of the ESD research landscape.
The biggest two groups consist of red nodes and blue nodes’ communities. Red nodes’
community centers around “knowledge”, “students”, “attitudes”, and “environmental education”
while blue nodes’ community centers around “competencies”, “framework”, “university”,
“science”, and “management”. These translate into two approaches to ESD research: one
emphasizes ESD as environment-oriented pedagogy and seeks to understand the attitude and
behavior of students with regard to ESD, whereas the other focuses on developing theories and
frameworks to competence learning as a tool to integrate ESD. In addition to the main nodes, small
nodes offer perspectives on the topics of those approaches. In the red nodes, a series of
psychological keywords (“beliefs”, “behaviors”, “perceptions”, “values”) are interconnected,
while the blue nodes contain essential keywords for ESD research, notably “challenges”, “barriers”,
“curriculum”, “university”, “strategies”, “implementation”, and “integration”.
Thematic map
Figure 12. Thematic map of ESD research landscape
Another function of bibliometrix r package allows us to map out major themes of the
research landscape (Cahlik, 2000), constructed as follows:
Niche themes: The up-left quadrant, with low centrality and high density, represents welldeveloped but marginal themes of the field.
Motor themes: The up-right quadrant, with high centrality and high density, represents
well-developed and critical themes for the overall development of the field.
Emerging or declining themes: The lower-left quadrant, with low centrality and low density,
represents weakly developed and marginal themes.
Basic themes: The lower-right quadrant, with high centrality and low density, represents
multidiscipline themes that are important for certain research areas of the overall field.
Basic and motor themes are similar to the findings of the co-occurrence maps, highlighting
topics that are well established in the fields. The following discussion will provide a
comprehensive review of each theme group.
5. Discussion
Motor theme: Students’ attitude and perception of ESD
The motor themes are characterized by their high density and high centrality. Here, we
found study on the attitudes of students on various aspects of ESD is one of the motor themes.
Specifically, there seems to be a general positive perception among the students, regardless of their
majors, toward sustainable development, yet many of them feel educational institutions need to do
more in terms of pedagogy and outreach to make the concept more concrete and relatable to their
specific field of study. Research studies in the motor themes also found various socio-demographic
determinants of attitude toward ESD such as age and gender. These results provide actionable
insights for the design and delivering of educational program to promote sustainability as a mindset
for the students (Vuong, 2020, 2021).
For instance, Zeegers and Clark (2014) looked into the sustainability awareness of 35
master's students in environmental studies by examining their changes in perception after a seminar
course in sustainability. As a result, the students, who started the course with an environmentalcentric view of sustainability, ended the course with similar perspectives despite undergoing an
interdisciplinary pedagogical approach to sustainability, in which economic, social, and
environmental factors were integrated. Another study by Aleixo et al. (2021) presented a
comprehensive analysis of Portugal students’ perception of sustainable development at the national
scale, surveying 1257 students on habits, behaviors, experiences, and knowledge of SDGs with
regards to sustainable development in their future career. In the findings, there were multiple
contradictions. While a large proportion of students had heard of the SDGs and recognized their
significance, many believed that higher education institutions can conduct more activities to
promote SDGs. In addition, although the issue of climate change was well aware among students,
very few of them had participated in extracurricular activities for sustainable development, notably
environmental or community volunteering. On categorizing students’ level of SDGs’ perception
and practices, the biggest 45% group of students had concerns regarding climate change and were
active in pro-environmental practices while the smallest 8% were questioning climate change and
thus less involved in such practices.
The cross-disciplinary approach with ESD as an integration element is also a popular
subject for many studies. Sharma and Kelly (2014) assessed business and accounting students’
attitudes toward ESD through a data survey of 60 students and further interviews with 20 students
among the group. The study found that the majority of the participants had a positive perception
of the ESD and sustainable business practices in their curriculum, and they were confident in their
level of sustainability knowledge. Tunji-Olayeni et al. (2020) studied the sustainability knowledge
of construction students namely “sustainable construction”. Through the survey and statistical
analysis approach, the study identified that while the concept was not well perceived among
students, they believed the concept can have great applications and were positive to learn more
about it. In addition, students associated sustainable construction with three main fields: renewable
energy, energy efficiency, and waste reduction. Angiel and Pokojski (2019) reviewed how ESD
was integrated into geography education by analyzing attitudes toward ESD of geography learners
at three levels: geography teachers, postgraduate graduates who are preparing to teach geography,
and undergraduates majoring in geography. First, most geography teachers (97%) were willing to
use the concepts of sustainable development in geographical education despite the fact that they
acquired this knowledge only after graduating during additional courses and training. These
teachers had a broad understanding of sustainable development and lived by its principles.
Secondly, teachers of other disciplines who planned to teach geography nonetheless didn’t adhere
to sustainable development principles or ESD in their classrooms even if they had postgraduatelevel knowledge. Finally, even though sustainable development and ESD information were
included in academic classes, only half of undergraduate students followed the concepts of
sustainable development. Specially, we indicated a study on the interdiscipline approach to ESD
by Annan-Diab and Molinari (2017) among the top cited publications, which is also the most recent
paper in this category. The study drawed on the Principles for Responsible Management Education
(PRME) and interdisciplinary education with sustainability and corporate social responsibility
(CSR) at its core. The principles of PRME, namely purpose, value, method, research, partnership,
and dialogue, are used to design the postgraduate MBA courses
In addition to studies targeting students’ attitudes toward ESD directly, there are research
papers on the factors that might positively influence ESD attitudes. A paper by Olsson and Gericke
(2016) showed that there was a clear surge in students’ awareness and interest in sustainable
development when students went through adolescence period. The study was conducted by
surveying 2413 Swedish students in sixth, ninth, and twelfth grades with an age-based
questionnaire. Also considering age as a factor, Michalos et al. (2011) hypothesized the predicting
variables of ESD perception, namely age, levels of education, attitude, and knowledge, through
which they sought to determine the most influential variable on behaviors for sustainable
development. To confirm their hypotheses, they surveyed 506 adults and 294 students from grade
6 to grade 12 in Canada on the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of the UN decade’s basic
themes. They found that attitude toward sustainable development had a relatively stronger
influence over pro-sustainability behaviors than age, levels of education, and knowledge. There
were striking differences between the adults and the students: while gender was the strongest
predicting variable of behaviors for sustainable development among the students, while having a
positive attitude toward sustainable development was the strongest predicting variable for the
adults. Furthermore, whereas knowledge was as influential as attitudes for the student sample,
attitudes were significantly more influential than education for the adult samples.
In addition, while perception is one of the keywords associated with the niche themes, it is
widely used in the abstracts of papers belonging to the motor themes. This implied that when
authors select a keyword to represent their study, “attitude” and “student” are more preferably
selected together than “perception”. Research in the motor theme reflected the learning aspects of
the ESD for 2030 agenda, with strong emphasis on cross-discriplinary and interdisciplinary to to
advance students’ understanding of sustainability in diverse context.
Basic theme: ESD in higher education and competency-based learning
The basic themes are characterized by their low density but high centrality, meaning they
are important parts of the literature, but the issues have been well-researched. ESD at the level of
higher education is one of the main research topics in the basic themes. Research on ESD at the
higher education level addressed the issue of monodisciplinary in university’s curriculum structure
and offered interdisciplinary approaches that have renovated their universities’ methods of
pedagogy (Cotton et al., 2009; Grierson & Munro, 2018; Rouhiainen & Vuorisalo, 2019; Zhang,
2013).
In the case study of UK and China universities (Zhang, 2013), differences between the
education system of a developed country and a developing country raised different interpretations
of interdisciplinary ESD. Whereas in England, learning through extra-curriculum and projectoriented activities had been implemented as interactive methods to increase learning engagement
of ESD, the changes in China required fundamental curriculum to adjust as to open to the activelearning characteristic of ESD. Examining another case, the curricula were intercrossed between
architecture and engineering with learning principles grounded in sustainability in the University
of Strathclyde Glasgow’s postgraduate program in the United Kingdom (Grierson & Munro, 2018).
The interdisciplinary character of the course proved a success after evaluation, with effective
learning methods and well-perceived by students who participated in it.
The involvement of stakeholders is another critical element to integrate ESD into higher
education (Farinha et al., 2017; Pellicer Sifres et al., 2016; Vargas et al., 2019). The level of
stakeholder can be internal as student and staff’s actions to promote ESD (Barth & Rieckmann,
2012; Novawan & Aisyiyah, 2020; Sivapalan, 2016) or external as governmental roles in
regulating educational policies (Banga Chhokar, 2010; Nomura & Abe, 2010). In strengthening
stakeholders’ engagements, Pellicer Sifres et al. (2016) emphasized the participatory character of
the activities. Activities to promote ESD to the public, notably research, teaching, awarenessraising, and policy advocacy would have meaningful impacts once stakeholders participating are
diverse (university and citizenry).
A large proportion of papers in this field examined ESD integration in traditional
competency-based education, making it a topic in the basic themes as well. As competency-based
education is grounded on an outcome-based approach to education, which is measured by
knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and behaviors, the inherent nature of ESD is a hard-to-quantify
variable. What competencies are indicators of success in ESD integration? While core
competencies for ESD have been theories by many authors in the fields, they usually emphasize
the essentiality of sustainable development knowledge (Hudima & Malolitneva, 2020). In other
words, the established sets of competencies for ESD lacked the attitudes, values, and skills that
enable a learner to contribute to sustainable development goals. For instance, Faham et al. (2017)
defined ESD competencies for students and graduates in eight variables: understanding of
sustainability, multidisciplinary collaboration, critical and creative thinking about sustainability,
systemic thinking about sustainability, commitment to sustainability, and respect for past, present,
and future generations. Sánchez-Carracedo et al. (2022) used the learning competencies of students
from different grades and majors to measure the quality and quantity of sustainability knowledge
that they have acquired throughout the ESD-integrated curriculum and to compare ESD
perceptions among education degrees and engineering degrees. Although the association of ESD
knowledge to success in fostering ESD competencies is understandable, by doing so, ESD
competencies might not correlate with other necessary competencies that are desirable by
traditional education standards. This aspect is partly mentioned in the most cited article in this
field, The integration of competencies for sustainable development in higher education: an
analysis of bachelor programs in management (Lambrechts et al., 2013). The study’s methodology
was to assess whether competencies for sustainable development were integrated into the key
competencies achieved at the university. For context, the study was conducted in universities
where sustainability was integrated at the core of the curriculum. Competencies for sustainable
development included responsibility, emotional intelligence, system orientation, future orientation,
personal involvement, and action skills, none of which are based on sustainability knowledge. As
a result, the integration of those competencies was found to be insufficient, implicit, and
fragmented. Thus, competencies for ESD that are not based on sustainability knowledge can be a
branch of studies in the future as it has the potential to combine traditional pedagogical planning
with the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability studies.
Niche themes: Cases of successful ESD integration
The niche themes are characterized by the high density but low centrality, which means,
papers on these themes have high connections among each other but they have not had the impacts
needed to be considered central themes. Our data show the niche theme for ESD research is
successful cases of ESD integration.
To illustrate, analyzing how ESD was introduced into Egyptian schools, Sewilam et al.
(2015) presented the European-Egyptian project “EduCamp” that incorporated main sustainability
development principles into the education system of Egypt. The project was based on the following
foundations: modifying pedagogical techniques, teaching the teachers, raising public awareness of
sustainability, and practicing a cooperative approach amongst various stakeholders. As a result,
ESD teaching kits were formed, which covered interactive learning activities on the themes of
biodiversity, agriculture, energy, and water. The kits were of course covered in the teachers’
training programs. Furthermore, centers of excellence on ESD were established to guide the
integration process and support teachers’ training.
In the university curriculum, Hoveskog et al. (2018) presented an undergraduate course
“Experimental Workshop”, in which the service-learning pedagogic approach reflected by the
combination of learning activities and community engagement was integrated. The purpose of the
course was for business students to come up with innovative business solutions for biogas
production in cooperation with farmers in southern Sweden. Through the course, the students had
the chance to utilize their theoretical knowledge while creating practical values for the community
and being in accordance with the models of sustainable business practices. In another case, Gómez
Zermeño and Alemán de la Garza (2021) described the formation of an open laboratory of social
innovation that connects the university to the public. In detail, 67 participants were contributing to
the lab, sharing their perspectives on raised social issues on the platform, and proposing solutions
to such problems. The participants came from multiple levels of university stakeholders, notably
university students, civil organizations, government officials, and university professors. The
platform acted as a connection between multiple stakeholder groups, namely academia, business,
and government, to work together on developing solution for community’s social issues, thus
collectively encourage social innovation with active engagement from multiple parties.
The element of interactive learning is crucial to help students accept ESD integration as
discussed in the section on ESD in higher education(Howell, 2021; Martínez Casanovas et al.,
2022; Zhang, 2013). One of the good methods to appeal to young learners is through a videogame,
as in the case of Ocean Limited (Koenigstein et al., 2020)- a game designed to promote players’
understanding of marine sustainability. In the game, Ocean Limited offered a thorough socialecological integration of global ocean systems, marine sustainability issues, and climate change
consequences by letting players choose their roles and actions as ocean stakeholders. Thus, the
players could develop ocean agreements and collaboration focused on sustainability, systemic
thinking, and empathy for other actors in the marine settings.
As these examples have illustrated, cases of successful ESD integration varies in their
characteristics, yet there seems to be an overarching theme of participatory design and
innovativeness. In other words, for new ESD programs to be well-received, they tend to require
active participation from the students rather than being passive receiver of information in a
traditional pedagogical approach. In addition, innovative methods to engage the learners with
concepts and wide-range perspectives in ESD are encouraged as new studies on the use of game
in promoting eco-friendly awareness have shown promising results (Ho et al., 2022a, 2022b;
Koenigstein et al., 2020).
Emerging or declining themes: Policy influence on ESD
Research papers on the topic of ESD policies belong to the emerging/ declining themes,
characterized by their low centrality and low density of the key words. In other words, research on
impacts of policy on ESD remains scattered, country-specific, and lack of generalizability.
For instance, the Japanese government was very supportive of the ESD agenda, and their
policies deliberately pushed for ESD integration in the educational system (Nomura & Abe, 2010).
However, these initiatives unintentionally create a dependency among the higher education
institutions, who have relied increasingly on the supports of the Japanese education ministry. Thus,
leadership development at individual higher education institutions was critical for the long-term
integration of ESD in Japan's education system. Unlike the Japanese situation, for Taiwan, ESD
integration had become a form of symbolism, serving bureaucratic functions rather than being
practical (Huang et al., 2021) as the country promoted the ESD content while not addressing
ongoing unsustainable development issues. In China, policies on rural education were irrational
and its emphasis on care for rural areas was insufficient, leading to the education system itself
being poorly operated, and a lack of resources for rural teachers (Xue et al., 2021).
The remaining papers on this topic had vastly distinctive objectives and outcomes,
examining specific characteristics of policy research in relation to ESD (Bengtsson, 2016; Huckle,
2008; Michalos et al., 2011). Consequently, future studies can build on this existing literature by
identifying general themes and research problems that can be studied across regions and countries.
Furthermore, studies that compare policy direction among different countries can have a huge
impact in filling the gap in the literature and also stimulating much needed policy dialogues among
the nations and international educators.
6. Limitation and conclusion
There are several limitations to the study. First, as only journal articles are selected, there
are potential gaps in knowledge of the field from other document types, such as books, conference
proceedings, or government documents. Secondly, we noticed a small proportion of the paper that
interpreted the meaning of ESD differently from its definition but have “education in sustainable
development” in their titles. Such papers are not included in the comprehensive review section but
might influence some results from the bibliometric review section. Finally, there might be missing
ESD research papers from our method of keyword search. Papers that do not deliberately
emphasize ESD elements in the title would not be collected.
In this study, we have provided a bibliometric and comprehensive review of the education
for sustainable development research landscape through a dataset of 632 journal articles. The
scientific productivity and citation metrics showed that this field is still developing and having a
medium impact. There are four foundation journals both for publishing and referencing, namely
Sustainability, Environmental Education Research, International Journal of Sustainability in
Higher Education, and Journal of Cleaner Production. On the global scale, Western Europe is the
most developed area for ESD studies, although we can see diverse collaboration among Europe
and North America, Asia, and Australia. In addition, the list of top-cited publications is a good
place for readers who wish to study the most impactful papers in the ESD field.
The co-occurrence map and thematic map offer insights into the structure of ESD research.
Based on such insights, we constructed reviews on students’ attitudes and perceptions toward ESD,
ESD in higher education, and competency-based education, cases of successful ESD integration,
and policy influence on ESD. For future research, attitude, and perception toward ESD will
continue to prosper and contribute significantly to the field as characterized by the motor theme.
Similarly, ESD on the topic of higher education and competency-based education serve as critical
research topics to integrate ESD into the current educational system. In addition, as the ESD for
2030 agenda (UNESCO, 2019, 2020) had defined the essential roles of governmental agencies and
stakeholders in promoting the practice of ESD to all levels of education and educational institutes,
we can expect a growing research number on the topic of policies and ESD.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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