The IMPACT Project: A Case Study of a Potentially Replicable and IDG-Aligned Education for Sustainable Development Initiative

Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is inadequate. Greater attention to the inner skills and qualities needed to achieve the SDGs is necessary. The Inner Development Goals (IDGs) outline 23 skills and qualities to focus on. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) initiatives in higher education are key to honing them but are often under-described, lack generalisability, and/or are under-theorised. This case study aimed to comprehensively report the context, background, development, implementation, and exploratory qualitative analysis of the pilot IMPACT (Inspiring Movements for Progressive Action and Change Together) Project for ESD practitioners to assess its replicability and value. The IMPACT Project is a one-day workshop supporting students to create change campaigns targeting field- and SDG-related issues. The case study further aimed to outline its pedagogical foundations, retrospectively map the IDGs to its activities, and retrospectively explore the qualitative data from the three pilot participants in relation to the Inner Development Goal (IDG) mappings and ESD literature. The purpose was to generate hypotheses for future research about whether and how the workshop might promote the IDGs. Two coders subjectively compared the workshop activities against the IDG definitions. All IDGs were associated with at least one activity. The same coders retrospectively explored the students’ feedback for potential IDG connections. When considered next to the IDG mappings and ESD literature, preliminary observations indicated plausibility that at least 15 IDGs may have the potential to be developed through the workshop. However, given our retrospective approaches, all preliminary observations and IDG mappings must be robustly assessed in future research, ideally in diverse educational and disciplinary contexts to determine the transferability of the workshop. Senior management in universities should make resources available for this to advance progress towards the IDGs and SDGs.