16 years of EESD. A review of the evolution of the EESD conference and its future challenges

Since the first Engineering Education in Sustainable Development (EESD) conference in 2002 in Delft, EESD has provided a platform for the exchange of concepts, policies, and strategies to enhance a sustainable education in engineering that train future engineering professionals with the appropriate competences to deal with sustainability challenges. During these 16 years (8 EESD conferences), engineering education has evolved and so has the EESD conference. This article aims to analyze the evolution of the EESD conferences and the future challenges of EESD through the characterization of all the papers (600) published and semi structured interviews to the coordinators of previous conferences. Authors from The Netherlands, Catalonia and Sweden were responsible for publishing the largest number of articles (46%) and they have played key roles in the collaboration networks among the ten countries, whose authors published the majority of JCLP’s articles. At the institutional level, the Universities TUDelft and UPC-Barcelona Tech were the universities with the largest number of articles (27%) and were central to the EESD’s collaborative networking processes. By investigating the co-occurrences of keywords, some topic clusters were identified. The categories that have most declined relevance during the EESD conferences are: Environmental Design, LCA and Management and policy; while Transdisciplinarity, Circular Economy, Ethics and philosophy have increased their relevance. The interviews to EESD conference organizers analysis shows that most argue that transdisciplinarity is crucial to improve EESD, that real EESD is not happening at the pace it should at universities; moreover, new topics and networking activities for conference organization are highlighted