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

Sustainable development is a challenge worldwide. The nine states located in the Baltic Sea Region, with different political systems, have developed different ways of coping with environmental issues and incorporating them in the national education systems. Early joint efforts to minimize these differences undertaken by the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM) and the Baltic University Programme (BUP) to bridge these differences are impressive. Still, we need to continue learning about environmental history, policy formulation and current state of affairs in order to get ready for future challenges. With respect to contemporary discussions on improving educational processes, the aim of this paper is to present a good practice example of teaching at a BUP member university, in the light of ESD principles. A specific course, Environmental Politics, focusing on capacity-building for national environmental policies, is scrutinized in order to find out how to engage students on this topic. The findings suggest that structured discussions of environmental cases in small seminar groups are conducive to teaching ESD at a BUP member university.