Educating experts for sustainable development : the master's degree in sustainable development at the University of Basel

There is a growing demand for scientifically trained experts in Sustainable Development(SD). However, it is far from clear what skills and knowledge an SD-curriculum has to offerSD-students. SD-science is not considered to be a true scientific discipline. There areno common theories, no commonly accepted methodologies and standards, and the rangeof scientific contributions spans a variety of different disciplines encompassing the naturalsciences, the social sciences, and economics. Against this background, we argue thata curriculum for an SD-Master’s program has to address three types of learning objective(“systems knowledge”, “transformation knowledge”, and the theoretical foundations ofthe different SD-approaches) and is challenged to integrate three complex features: therelation (i) between disciplinary and interdisciplinary competences, (ii) between theoreticalknowledge and practical skills, and between (iii) normative and non-normativeelements in SD. This paper presents how these challenges are solved for the Basel’s Masterin SD and how the program has been developed since it started in 2005.