Former des économistes au développement durable : les enjeux d’une expérimentation niveau Master

• Main Authors: Catherine Figuière, Michel Rocca
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Éditions en environnement VertigO 2012-04-01
• Series: VertigO
• Subjects: Keywords : Sustainable development; education for sustainable development; economist; higher education; change management.
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/vertigo/11621

This paper aims at giving an account of an experimentation carried out at Grenoble University of Social Science, in the field of education for sustainable development at Master’s degree level. In the first year of this master’s, economics students can follow many different courses dealing with the implementation of sustainable development, specifically in the context of private businesses and public institutions. The follow up of various classes shows that the students who are interested in sustainable development tend to enroll in a professional master’s degree specialized in “socio-economic change and organizational change management”. Nevertheless the courses taught in this degree do not directly tackle the issue of sustainable development. Indeed, the objective of this master’s degree is to train students in the field of organizational change and to teach them how to work with the (participative) methods and tools necessary to put in place strategies for change, more particularly in a context of mutation, this being a requirement to implement sustainable development policies. Using the analysis of the early career tracks of the graduates and a job description database, this paper stresses the relevance of this customized education, which meets employers’ expectations, since they are eager to develop sustainable practices within their own organizations.