Education for Sustainable Development: A Case Study of Incorporating Key Elements through Course Design

Sustainable development is a challenge worldwide. The nine stateslocated in the Baltic Sea Region, with different political systems, havedeveloped different ways of coping with environmental issues and incorporatingthem in the national education systems. Early joint efforts to minimize thesedifferences undertaken by the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM) and the BalticUniversity Programme (BUP) to bridge these differences are impressive. Still,we need to continue learning about environmental history, policy formulationand current state of affairs in order to get ready for future challenges. Withrespect to contemporary discussions on improving educational processes, the aimof this paper is to present a good practice example of teaching at a BUP memberuniversity, in the light of ESD principles. A specific course, EnvironmentalPolitics, focusing on capacity-building for national environmental policies, isscrutinized in order to find out how to engage students on this topic. Thefindings suggest that structured discussions of environmental cases in smallseminar groups are conducive to teaching ESD at a BUP member university