Sustainable future: Students' perceptions of sustainable development. Case study of Ukraine

Sustainable development has been recognized as a global concern by the majority of the countries around the world. The importance of education for sustainable development for reaching sustainability has been recently emphasized by the international community. As a result of this recognition, the decade of education for sustainable development has been initiated by UN. The purpose of this thesis is to study what actions Ukraine has adopted towards reaching sustainability, particularly in the education sphere. The study explores how the elements of sustainable development are incorporated into higher education in Ukraine and how students perceive and value this concept. The study has been carried out using a combination of questionnaires, informal discussions, website and literature analysis. The results achieved indicate that educational development towards sustainability is extremely slow, with national commitments being mostly declarative. At the university level there are no programs and courses that cover sustainability issues and no extra classes related to sustainability are offered. The analysis of the questionnaires shows that the awareness about the concept of sustainable development among the students is extremely low. The results indicate that the sustainability ranking of Ukaine will not change in the nearest future