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The purpose of this paper is to focus on the way in which principals in different countries are securing successful organisational change through systematically building social capital. It argues that how a school works as a cohesive unit and how people collaborates will ultimately define organisational performance.

The paper draws upon the international literature to explore how principals are building the social capital for organisational improvement but is not a review of the literature. It adopts a cross-cultural perspective and explores collective capacity building for organisational improvement.

This paper concludes that “disciplined” professional collaboration is an important way in which principals can create and sustain the social capital for organisational change.

The paper is a conceptual piece that proposes that creating social capital, rather than individual or professional capital, is now an essential task for principals seeking successful organisational change and improved outcomes. It explores the idea of “disciplined collaboration” as a methodology for building social capital in a rigorous, effective and sustainable way.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the process of creating and implementing sustainability competencies across a university illuminate dynamics of organizational change. The push to advance education for sustainable development in higher education will likely require transformation of existing policies and practices. A set of shared sustainability competencies could guide the integration of sustainability throughout an institution.

This paper reports on a case study of one US university, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) that developed institutional-level sustainability competencies. The process used to create and implement sustainability competencies is outlined, and key factors that influenced the associated organizational change are identified.

Very few US universities have institutional-level sustainability competencies. At UNH, drivers of organizational change such as overcoming disciplinary boundaries, developing a common vision and working from the bottom-up enabled the creation of institutional sustainability competencies, but the same processes were not enough to drive deeper implementation of the competencies.

This paper not only identifies the context-specific drivers of the development of institutional sustainability competencies, but also identifies universal themes that can be applied to other institutions embarking on a similar process. Additionally, this paper serves as a foundation for future research exploring how the process of creating institutional sustainability competencies may be linked to how effective they are in shaping subsequent sustainability education.

This paper aims to find the role of education in enhancing the status of women entrepreneurs through empowerment and self-employment. This will also help in upliftment of women and community services being contributed by them. The data were collected from all over India (east, west, north and south).

The empirical study aims at developing the understanding about role of nature of business-influencing community services through women entrepreneurship. Several organizations from manufacturing and services sectors were selected for the empirical study established by women entrepreneurs.

The data were collected through a questionnaire survey, observations and an interview method. There is a significant relationship between size of the business expansion and the sector of business and profit generated for enhancing community services through women entrepreneurship.

This implies that in the Indian context, mostly women entrepreneurs invest and set up enterprises mostly in sectors of beauty, retail, food and childcare, other sectors that require less investment, less manual labor and comparatively non-heavy engineering sectors.

The results show that the expansion plan is dependent on the profits and objective of community services generated in the business.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the behavioral barriers to sustainable action in a campus community.

This paper reports three different methodological approaches to the assessment of behavioral barriers to sustainable actions on a college campus. Focus groups and surveys were used to assess campus members’ opinions about the barriers that limit sustainable behaviors on campus. After identifying general barriers, behavioral assessment was used to assess specific barriers to energy conservation in a target location on campus and to develop an intervention to reduce energy use for that location.

Across methodologies, four key behavioral barriers to sustainable actions were consistently reported: communication/awareness, inconvenience, financial concerns and lack of engagement. The intervention that was developed targeted the barriers of communication issues and lack of awareness and resulted in reduced energy use for a target campus location.

This paper highlights the value of assessing barriers to ongoing sustainability efforts using multiple methods and using this information to develop an intervention to foster behavioral change. The paper also highlights strategies that have been implemented to address some of the barriers which were identified.

The research reported in this ongoing study aims to investigate the notion of knowledge assets developed within digital communities in the course of their economic or leisure activities. Ideally, the resulting knowledge is universal, affordable and relevant; this inclusiveness is a hallmark of any information or knowledge society.

The authors first synthesize the related research literature covering the areas of knowledge‐based economies, knowledge societies and knowledge policies. A model using 13 dimensions is then developed, which the authors claim is critical for creating a knowledge community in the digital economy. The model is validated against critique from a Delphi panel of researchers in the area.

While creating a knowledge society encompasses dimensions pertaining to infrastructure, governance, talent and culture, intangible assets are key to sustaining such societies. Governance and culture are instances of such intangibles. Talent may seem to be tangible but the human capacity for learning and development, which leads to an innovative culture, is less so. In any case, time is the essential ingredient for a knowledge culture to come about.

Knowledge societies are not measurable constructs that can be described quantitatively and benchmarked with weighted summations of scores along prescribed dimensions. It would be a fallacy to treat the notion of a knowledge index as a socio‐economic measure of success.

. conclude with a practical view of how the dimensions may be best exploited in the course of a policy discussion on sustainable knowledge societies.

It is hoped that the research will provide a framework for policy makers and analysts to conduct qualitative discussions on creating and sustaining knowledge societies.

This paper aims to increase related knowledge across personal, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability and how it can be applied to support transformative learning.

The paper provides a reflexive case study of the design, content and impact of a course on eco-justice that integrates relational learning with an equity and justice lens. The reflexive case study provides a critical, exploratory self-assessment, including interviews, group discussions and surveys with key stakeholders and course participants.

The results show how relational approaches can support transformative learning for sustainability and provide concrete practices, pathways and recommendations for curricula development that other universities/training institutions could follow or learn from.

Sustainability research, practice and education generally focuses on structural or systemic factors of transformation (e.g. technology, governance and policy) without due consideration as to how institutions and systems are shaping and shaped by the transformation of personal agency and subjectivity. This presents a vast untapped and under-studied potential for addressing deep leverage points for change by using a relational approach to link personal, societal and ecological transformations for sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the recent history of climate action planning at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), a public university with a long history of sustainability action and commitment. Items discussed include a partnership with Clean Air‐Cool Planet (CA‐CP) to produce a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory tool that adapted national and international inventory methodologies to the unique scale and character of a university community; involvement of administrators, faculty, staff and students in climate action planning, including to meet the requirements of the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC); and the role of climate action planning within a broader institutional goal of integrating sustainability across curricula, operations, research and engagement efforts.

Background and historical information is shared in terms of best practices and lessons learned.

Successful climate action planning includes campus‐wide stakeholder involvement, an institution‐wide commitment to sustainability, and careful planning and partnerships that tie into a higher education institution's educational mission and identity and that take into account the culture and sense of place of each institution.

The paper contains lessons learned and best practices from which other institutions of higher education might learn.

UNH, a recognized national leader in sustainability and climate protection, and CA‐CP developed one of the first emissions inventory tools for higher education in the USA. The tool has been adopted by more than 1,000 campuses and was adopted by the ACUPCC as the recommended tool for campuses not already participating in another GHG inventorying program. Instead of recreating the wheel, campuses may be able to learn from UNH and CA‐CP's climate planning experience and history.

The importance of early and developmentally appropriate science education is increasingly recognized. Consequently, creation of common guidelines and standards in early childhood science education has begun (National Research Council (NRC), 2012), and researchers, practitioners, and policy makers have shown great interest in aligning professional development with the new guidelines and standards. There are some important issues that need to be addressed in order to successfully implement guidelines and make progress toward accomplishing standards. Early childhood teachers have expressed a lack of confidence in teaching science and nature (Torquati, Cutler, Gilkerson, & Sarver, in press) and have limited science and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) (Appleton, 2008). These are critical issues because teachers’ subject-matter knowledge is a robust predictor of student learning outcomes (Enfield & Rogers, 2009; Kennedy, 1998; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2002) and is seen as a critical step toward improving K-12 student achievement (National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century (NCMST), 2000; NRC, 2000). We argue that the same is true of preschool teachers.

This chapter discusses: (a) theories and practices in early childhood science education (i.e., preschool through 3rd grade) in relation to teaching for conceptual change, (b) research on methods of professional development in early childhood science education, and (c) innovative approaches to integrating scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas with early childhood professional development.