Water Education for Sustainability: Criteria and Recommendations

Is Subjective Knowledge the Key to Fostering Sustainable Behavior? Mixed Evidence from an Education Intervention in Mexico

“…The central tenant our of course was to let the students choose what sustainable actions they wanted to focus on based on what was most relevant to their personal lives and was an appropriate scale for a one semester course. We then connected the research and broader problems and solutions to their selected focus/action, bridging the 'knowledge-action gap' [6,8,33]. Due to the personal nature of individual behavior change, we also built in moments for reflection and positive reinforcement, therefore expanding the traditional knowledge to action cluster to a more robust knowledge-action-reflection cycle.…”

“…The pedagogy and course design were based on the Education for Sustainability framework initially laid out in Redman and Larson [6]. Here we briefly explain three key examples of how the implementation of this framework operated:…”

“…Others have pointed to education as one of the best entry points for fostering Sustainable behavior change [2][3][4][5]. Unfortunately, even education programs with explicit Sustainable behavior change goals are failing to integrate the most basic behavioral research into their curricular design and implementation [6]. One practical framework for educational interventions which foster Sustainable behavior change, was proposed by one of us [7]; hereafter referred to as the Educating for Sustainability framework (EfS).…”

“…Evidence has been found in support of many of them but none are convincing as being complete explanations for human behavior. The use of effectiveness knowledge and social knowledge in [6] was an attempt to reconcile and synergize these theories. But we now propose that the more coherent synergy is to group all of them under Subjective knowledge; • From a research perspective designing survey questions which only got at social knowledge or only effectiveness knowledge proved impractical.…”

Structural and Contentual Complexity in Water Governance

“…(2) Nowadays, there is a growing conviction that cross-sectoral co-ordination and knowledge integration is a necessity for organizing knowledge production for sustainability, which must be shared among actors by means of social learning processes [27]. Larson and Redman [99] apply the Kaiser-Fuhrer typology to water education programs. Schneiderhan-Opel and Bogner [100] and LaDue et al [101] both elaborate on 'water literacy'-combining hydro-social knowledge and decisions on water-related, socio-scientific issues-amongst pupils or students.…”