Sustainability Education in Project Management

Dear Colleagues,

The inclusion of sustainability into various stages of project development requires changes to the mind-set of the people and organizations involved in the project so that they become able to collaborate efficiently on multiple levels. It requires a change of project focus from purely planning and controlling the usual triple project constraints to taking more responsibility to the development of organization and society at large. Incorporating sustainability principles into the project management processes requires, therefore, creating reflective practitioners who have holistic understanding of the project and its context.  The inclusion of sustainability also requires a shift from problem solving to problem framing before finding innovative and integrative solutions to these problems.  In addition, the inclusion of sustainability requires competencies and skills to set the sustainability goals, to develop sustainable project processes, and to handle the emerging uncertainty and complexity of the project, programs or a portfolio of projects. The inclusion of sustainability requires teaching methods that are participatory and collaborative to support the learners' critical thinking of the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability.

There is, however, a gap in the current body of knowledge on project management with regard to what type of knowledge, skills and competences are needed in order to enable project managers to include the sustainability agenda into projects. In addition, there is a need to understand how these competences and skills should be taught and evaluated. This Special Issue aims to present insights and research output by international researchers and academics to address this gap.

Researchers from across the globe are invited to share their research insights and outputs using quantitative and qualitative empirical studies, conceptual papers, systematic literature reviews or metanalysis on one or more of the following topics related to Sustainability Education in Project Management: 

• Curriculum design. Design of single courses or multiple courses to introduce sustainability in project management education, including, for example, development of learning objectives, content and course design, delivery methods, involvement of students and faculties, challenges and lessons-learned from these courses. Description of the results achieved. 
• Pedagogical approaches that supports teaching and learning sustainability, including but not limited to efforts that describe and examine alternative pedagogies and teaching practices that support critical thinking, participatory learning, project-based learning and on-the-job learning. 
• Assessment methods. Evaluation and assessment methods to evaluate the impact of the teaching methods or learning outcome.

Dr. Bassam Hussein
Prof. Dr. Carsten Wolff
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• learning
• learning methods
• assessment
• project management education