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Education for Sustainable Development

Open Teaching Resources
for Sustainability Transformations

Freely accessible course materials, methods guides, and learning resources developed at CDE — supporting research-oriented education on sustainable development, plural economics, and sustainability transformations.

Available Teaching Resources

Each resource is openly licensed and available as a GitHub repository. Click through to the course page or browse the source files directly on GitHub.

Knowledge Resources & Materials

Basics of Sustainability

A comprehensive introduction to sustainability covering planetary boundaries, sustainability transformations, and the multiple dimensions of sustainable development. Designed as a university-level special course.

Knowledge Resources & Materials

Sustainable Economics

An introduction to sustainable and plural economics, covering heterodox approaches, post-growth thinking, and the economics of sustainability transformations. Developed for master-level students.

Knowledge Resources & Materials

Inter- and Transdisciplinary Methods

Teaching materials for ID/TD research methods — core competencies for sustainability research, collaborative problem-solving, and working across disciplinary and societal boundaries.

Knowledge Resources & Materials

Introduction to R

A blog-format introduction to R for data analysis and visualisation, developed for students in sustainability and development research. Covers data wrangling, visualisation, and reproducible workflows.

How to Use These Materials

All resources are designed for reuse and adaptation under open licenses. Whether you are a student, lecturer, or sustainability practitioner, here is how to get started.

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Read online

Each course has a dedicated web page. Click "Open course" on any card above to access the materials directly in your browser — no download or account needed.

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Download or fork

Every resource lives in a public GitHub repository. Clone or fork the repo to get all source files, adapt content for your own course, or contribute improvements.

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Adapt and reuse

Materials are openly licensed (see below). You are welcome to adapt them for your institutional context — just keep the attribution and share under the same terms.

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Contribute or get in touch

Found an error, have a suggestion, or want to contribute materials? Open an issue on the relevant GitHub repository, or contact CDE directly via the website below.

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Use in your institution

These resources support Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) at all levels. They are modular — individual sections can be integrated into existing courses without using the full resource.

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Global South & North

Materials are developed with both Global North and South contexts in mind, reflecting CDE's mandate to support sustainable development across different institutional and regional settings.

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Open License. Teaching materials in this repository are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license unless stated otherwise in the individual repository. You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, provided you give appropriate credit to CDE, University of Bern.