Sustainability Science in Universities Is Booming, But a New Global Analysis Reveals Who Is Being Left Behind

Fifty years of scientific output on sustainability in higher education have been mapped, counted and connected in one of the most comprehensive bibliometric assessments of the field ever attempted, and the results tell a story of remarkable growth shadowed by stubborn inequality. A research team led by Tony Gunckel and Andres Rubio of Universidad Andres Bello in Chile, together with Rosa Florensa Guiu of the Universidad de Lleida in Spain and Hugo Moraga of the Universidad de Concepción, analyzed publications, citations and co-authorship networks dating back to 1975 to reconstruct how universities around the world have built — and in many ways failed to share — the knowledge base for educating the next generation of sustainability leaders. Their study, published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, documents a sustained and accelerating rise in scientific production driven overwhelmingly by developed countries, while identifying structural barriers that continue to silence much of the developing world.

The technical machinery behind the study is as important as its findings. Bibliometrics and scientometrics treat the scientific literature itself as a dataset: every paper becomes a node in a network, every citation a directed edge, every co-authorship a bond between institutions and nations. By systematically extracting these relationships and visualizing them with tools such as co-authorship mapping, the researchers could measure not only how much has been published about sustainability in higher education but who produces it, who cites it, and how tightly — or loosely — the global research community is woven together. This approach follows well-established methodological guidance in the field, including frameworks for conducting rigorous bibliometric reviews and the principles laid out in the Leiden Manifesto for responsible research metrics, which caution against reducing science to raw counts alone.

What the analysis found is a field that has expanded almost continuously since its modest beginnings in the mid-1970s. The early literature, emerging in the wake of the environmental movement and the concept of sustainable development, was sparse and largely concentrated in North America and Western Europe. Over subsequent decades, publication volumes climbed steadily, with particularly sharp acceleration after the United Nations launched its Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and, later, the 2030 Agenda and its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. Universities responded to these policy signals by embedding sustainability into curricula, research agendas and institutional commitments, generating a corresponding wave of scholarly output that examined everything from key competencies for sustainable development to the greening of campus operations and the integration of the goals into formative academic offerings.

Yet the geography of this growth is deeply lopsided. Developed countries serve as the key drivers of scientific production in the field, accounting for the lion’s share of publications, citations and institutional leadership. Researchers in wealthy nations dominate the most-cited journals, convene the major conferences, and set the intellectual agenda for how sustainability should be taught. By contrast, the study identifies significant barriers limiting the participation of developing countries — most notably the scarcity of research funding and the lack of international cooperation. These constraints do not merely reduce publication counts; they adversely affect the global impact of scholarship produced in the Global South, where many of the most acute sustainability challenges — from climate vulnerability to biodiversity loss to energy poverty — are experienced most directly.

Perhaps the most technically revealing component of the study is its co-authorship network analysis, which exposes significant fragmentation in collaboration among researchers from different regions. In network terms, the global research community on sustainability in higher education is not a densely connected web but an archipelago of clusters, with strong ties within regions and institutions but comparatively weak bridges across them. This fragmentation matters for a very practical reason: sustainability is inherently a transdisciplinary enterprise, requiring the integration of insights from engineering, ecology, economics, pedagogy and the social sciences. When researchers from different regions and disciplines rarely co-publish, transdisciplinary approaches struggle to take root, and the field risks reproducing the same siloed thinking that sustainability education is meant to overcome.

The study also delivers a timely assessment of how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped sustainability education. When campuses closed in 2020, universities were forced to migrate hands-on, experiential learning — a cornerstone of education for sustainable development — into digital environments. The analysis highlights the rapid adoption of hybrid pedagogical models that combine digital tools with practical approaches, a shift that began as emergency improvisation and has since evolved into a durable feature of the pedagogical landscape. Researchers who had long championed real-world learning opportunities, in which students move from the classroom into communities and workplaces to tackle live sustainability problems, found themselves redesigning these experiences for screens. The pandemic thus functioned as an unplanned stress test, accelerating digital transformation in ways that would otherwise have taken years.

The regional perspectives in the study are particularly valuable because they come from a research team rooted in Latin America and Europe rather than the traditional centers of bibliometric research in North America and Northern Europe. Latin American universities have been actively mapping their sustainability initiatives, from institutional declarations to curricular reforms, and scholarship from the region has documented both encouraging progress and persistent obstacles, including limited funding, heavy teaching loads and weak institutional incentives for sustainability research. Chilean universities, for example, have been the subject of bibliometric analyses of social responsibility, and Colombian institutions have been studied for holistic integration of sustainability. The new study situates these regional efforts within the global picture, showing how they connect — or fail to connect — to the wider network.

The authors close with recommendations aimed at strengthening international collaboration and consolidating regional research networks. Concretely, this means designing funding instruments that explicitly support North-South and South-South partnerships, reducing the administrative and financial barriers that keep researchers in developing countries out of international consortia, and building regional networks that can aggregate critical mass before plugging into global structures. It also means investing in the research infrastructure of the Global South — journal access, bibliometric visibility, open publishing pathways — so that locally generated knowledge about sustainability education can circulate globally rather than remaining invisible to citation indices, which are known to underrepresent journals from developing regions.

The stakes of these reforms could hardly be higher. Higher education institutions are widely regarded as critical actors in creating a sustainable future: they train the professionals who will design climate policy, manage ecosystems and transform industries, and they produce much of the research on which those decisions depend. If the knowledge base for sustainability education remains concentrated in a handful of wealthy countries, the solutions it generates will be shaped by a narrow band of experience and may fit poorly in the contexts that need them most. Conversely, a genuinely connected, well-funded and transdisciplinary global research community could accelerate the flow of good practice from wherever it emerges to wherever it is needed. The new analysis provides both a warning about the current state of the network and a quantitative roadmap for weaving it together.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric and scientometric analysis of global scientific production, collaboration networks and regional disparities in sustainability research within higher education since 1975.

Article Title: Global patterns in higher education and sustainability research: trends, collaboration networks and regional perspectives

Article References: Gunckel, T., Rubio, A., Guiu, R. F., & Moraga, H. (2026). Global patterns in higher education and sustainability research: trends, collaboration networks and regional perspectives. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01138-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01138-4

Keywords: sustainability, higher education, bibliometric analysis, scientometrics, co-authorship networks, Sustainable Development Goals, international collaboration, developing countries, research funding, COVID-19, hybrid pedagogy, transdisciplinary research