The Sustainability Grand Challenge

How do universities tackle wicked sustainability challenges faced by society?

The Wicked Learning Workbook is a toolkit for setting up and running an interdisciplinary master-level course in the context of real-world problems such as food waste and loss. The book offers a new pedagogical approach that we call 'wicked' because it is unorthodox, ambitious, and tackles complex problems that won’t go away. The pedagogy is also international at the course level rather than the conventional exchange semester, enabling institutions to embed international approaches to their core teaching.

The Wicked Learning Workbook speaks directly to academics who are looking for solutions that provide stimuli for research and teaching while giving students an innovative, international learning experience. The approach develops student understanding of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as broad-scale societal issues which are difficult, if not impossible, to ‘solve’. An important outcome of this approach is the laboratory-style classroom that creates opportunities for faculty, students and companies to co-create solutions that are immediately implementable. The resulting methodology is based on industry–university collaboration (such as IKEA and Nestlé). The methodology is of interest to corporate leaders pursuing sustainability goals and business transformation.

Achieving sustainability requires cross-boundary, cross-disciplinary, experimental approaches that allow for scalability. Wicked problems can only be tackled with wicked solution approaches.

Michael Gibbert is Professor of Sustainable Consumption and director of the World Challenge Program at Università della Svizzera italiana in Switzerland.

Liisa Välikangas is Professor of Leadership at the Technical University of Denmark, DTU. She is also affiliated with Hanken School of Economics in Finland.

Marijane Luistro-Jonsson is Post-Doctoral Researcher at Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden, where she teaches and conducts interdisciplinary research on the behavioural dimension of sustainability.