Involvement in Higher Education is seen by many people as a means of developing students’ critical abilities and is allied with the assumption that such learning will be beneficial to the world-wide community. This viewpoint was exemplified in the 2002 Johannesburg Earth Summit, where the role of Higher Education in preparing students to participate in an informed way with sustainable development was emphasised. The Summit’s ‘mandate’ was that sustainable development could, and should, be integrated into all academic subjects. Before this can become a reality, some important questions need to be answered: How do academics see the relationships between sustainable development and their discipline? Do they see sustainable development as a central issue to their discipline and student learning, or as an irrelevant ‘add on’? How can sustainable development be understood as a core generic capability? In this paper, we look at the outcomes from a recent research project in which we investigated academics’ experience of sustainable development in the context of teaching in their discipline area. We look at their range of views about sustainable development and its relationship to their discipline, and we examine some of the ways in which they have developed their teaching approaches to incorporate sustainable development from different disciplinary perspectives. Our aim is to use our research outcomes to critically investigate the role of Higher Education in the notion of sustainability and its contribution towards the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

Keywords: sustainable development, generic capabilities, conceptual variation.