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Dr Katja M Hallenberg & Dr Maryse Tennant
Sustainability is important in all areas of our lives. It has a contribution to make to higher education, our University, our discipline of criminology and criminal justice, but also to us and to our students. Here we discuss why that is, and what we (academics and students alike) have gained from a project that explored the responses of criminology/criminal justice students to the Whole Earth? exhibition.
In 2005 the United Nation’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) called for universities to “function as places of research and learning for sustainable development” (UNESCO, 2005 for the full implementation scheme). The roots of education for sustainable development (ESD) are in values-driven/adjectival educational and curriculum movements, and it provides a vision of education that “…seeks to balance human and economic well-being with cultural traditions and respect for the earth’s natural resources” (UNESCO, n.d.). Nationally, the importance of ESD is emphasised in the recent HEA/QAA (2014) Guidance which recognises sustainability at its broadest sense, encompassing areas of global citizenship, environmental stewardship, social justice, ethics and wellbeing, as well as futures thinking. It is notable that these are echoed in the NSS/USS questions, linking the issue of sustainability to excellence in teaching and learning.
Sustainability is also valued at our University where it has developed through gradual organisational embedding (Scoffham, 2016) and is now firmly established as part of the current Strategic Framework. In the criminology programme at Canterbury Christ Church University we have acted on the growing importance of sustainability within higher education with efforts to embed sustainability within the curriculum. This work has been supported by the University’s Futures Initiative, which acts as “a long-term change programme designed to develop understanding about sustainability in academic life” (see the following resources for more information: The FI principles and approaches, Annual Report, Exploring Sustainability Website, and which also helped to fund the current project. In doing this, we have drawn on some of the obvious links in terms of green criminology but we also highlight the ways that the social, economic and cultural aspects of sustainability fit very comfortably in the discipline’s focus on issues of (in)equality and (in)justice (see Agyeman et al, 2003 on justice and sustainability), particularly through the lens of critical criminology. The concept of climate justice too has become increasingly topical, while research warns us of the various criminogenic changes global warming will contribute to: resource scarcity, migration, undermined state security mechanisms including weakening of criminal justice infrastructure and strengthening of illegal markets (Crank & Jacoby, 2015).
The current project was an extra-curricular opportunity offered to c