Article Gold Open Access 2012

National sustainability outreach assessment based on human and social capital: The case of environmental sciences in Switzerland

Sustainability
Journal · Vol. 4 · Issue 1 · pp. 17-41
Abstract

This paper reports on a sustainability outreach study based on an assessment of human and social capital. The aim was to capture the national sustainability outreach of twenty years of Environmental Sciences education, centered at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. The study contained two lines of research, one being a human capital assessment with a survey among graduates from the years 1992 to 2005 (n = 542) and the other being a social capital analysis based on interviews with institutions that represent the Swiss social systems of economy, politics/public administration and civil society (20 institutions). Our analyses reveal several functional forms of both human capital (specialists, pioneers, leaders) and social capital (qualification profile, internalization, networks, standardization, professionalization) that trigger and channel sustainability outreach. © 2012 by the authors.

Keywords

Author Keywords

human capital Social capital Environmental sciences Sustainability outreach

Index Keywords

Sustainable development Human capitals Personnel Environmental science Environmental technology Social systems Social capitals Civil society Functional forms Qualification profile Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Author Affiliations
Institute of Geography, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Department of Environmental Sciences, ETH Zürich, Zurich, ZH, Switzerland
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
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10 Ecological Communication, (1989)
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