Rethinking Sustainability: Principles and Practice

This open access book offers innovations in how sustainability is studied, taught, and practiced across academic and professional contexts. The book captures the richness of current principles and practice in sustainability from diverse geographical and academic perspectives. The reader is guided through four structured thematic sections: Teaching, Learning and Understanding ‘Sustainability’; Core Debates and Controversies in Sustainability; Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability in Practice; The Role of Higher Education and Academia in Sustainability.

Designed as a hybrid publication, the book combines pedagogical features—such as study exercises and learning prompts—with the thematic depth of a scholarly edited volume. This format makes it invaluable for students, educators, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers seeking both foundational knowledge and advanced insights to sustainability research.

Antje Brown is a Lecturer in Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, UK, and originally from Berlin, with a Politics degree from Glasgow and a PhD from Stirling University. Antje has published on, and is particularly interested in, environmental politics, policy discourses, framings and implementations. Her involvement in a number of modules in Sustainable Development taught at various levels of the St Andrews degree programme inspired her to initiate this book project.  

Sandra Gilgan is an academic manager and affiliated researcher at the University of Bonn, Germany. She studied and conducted research at the Universities of Münster, Trier, and Bonn, as well as at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan, and Xiamen University in China. As a cultural scientist, she is involved in several initiatives exploring ‘plural sustainabilities’. Her research interests include social movements, utopian thinking, and processes of social change.