Sustainable development for tomorrow : Enabling local implementations of global issuesin Swedish schools

Abstract: This study investigates forces and organizational structures that facilitate or hinder sustainabledevelopment to be introduced and integrated in the core activities of public institutions.Specifically, the way global national sustainable development goals find their way into thelocal curriculum and overall-encompassing strategy of a few Swedish high-schools isidentified.To facilitate the search, the study is assisted by actor-network theory to find human and nonhuman―power-brokers‖ that can ensure the adoption and continuous application of newconcepts in a school. A pre-study of several schools, consisting of explorative interviews,located and classified factors and processes of potential importance for the implementation ofactivities related to sustainable development. At the same time, the large variety ofdefinitions of sustainable development encountered was recorded.The main study expanded on the findings from the pre-study and provided a more detailedanalysis of one senior high-school (upper secondary school). Several examples oforganizational structures and other factors– macro-actors in the theoretical model - werelocated with the potential to influence the furthering of the cause of sustainable developmentin that particular school. The possibility is discussed that the school would profit fromdeveloping a common mode of communication based on exploring experiences from applyingthe many issues that can be related to sustainable development. Such an endeavor could resultin organizational change typical of a learning organization. In that case, the resilience andcapacity of the organization to handle abrupt changes in national policy would be increased aswell as the preparedness of its students – our future – to handle rapidly changing situations intomorrow‗s society.The study further suggest that a similar ―tool-box‖ of theoretical models could be applied tothe local implementation of other national issues in an institutional setting.