The inner development goals as an innovative approach to sustainable development: conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation of an experiential university seminar for holistic sustainability education

Abstract

At the current rate, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will mostly not be met in time. An important reason is that we lack the inner capacity to deal with our increasingly complex environmental and societal challenges and to co-create a more desirable future. Recently, the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) initiative identified 23 crucial inner skills and qualities, structured along five dimensions. We contribute to the literature by developing, implementing, and evaluating an innovative experiential seminar for university students, which systematically covers all five IDG dimensions and touches on all 23 elements. It combines short conceptual inputs with a diversity of practical tools for experiencing and training the IDGs. The seminar targets an interdisciplinary mix of Master-level study programs, with students from many different nationalities. To tangibly illustrate connections between IDGs and SDGs and link to real-life sustainable behavior of students, the cocoa-chocolate value chain was used as a guiding example. Key themes covered were core values, character strengths, mindfulness, emotions, perspective taking, visioning, and changing habits. Among the key take-home messages that students indicated they would like to preserve, the most prominent ones are related to self-awareness and inner compass, followed by complexity awareness, perspective taking, appreciation, and optimism.