Policy research in the context of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is getting more and more attention (Van Poeck/ Lysgaard 2015, Læssøe et al. 2013). It can offer insights about the typical processes and dynamics of strengthening ESD in a special area and thereby has the potential to contribute fruitfully to a mainstreaming of ESD. While conducting ESD policy research projects, it is important to reflect on the different systems and their dominant actors and logics that come together at the science-policy interface. On the one side, there is the logics of policy where evidence-based recommendations are of importance for efforts in strengthening ESD in order to legitimatize and communicate policy initiatives towards the wider public. This policy-level also has to deal with an increasing orientation of local policies towards international trends and best practices (McKenzie et al. 2015) as a result of emerging international indicators and benchmarking systems. For example, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the heart of the Agenda 2030 and the search for an adequate indicator of the aim 4.7 represent this tendency to orientate educational and sustainability policy towards standardized paths of governance. On the other side, the logics of science does,  in the context of ESD, support a systematic knowledge production to describe the implementation of ESD, its drivers and barriers. Beside such a descriptive-analytical form of scientific knowledge production, a transformational research approach in sustainability science emerges.  It is aiming at the active contribution to solve concrete sustainability problems (Wiek/Lang 2016). Furthermore, in sustainability research, there is a growing attention towards identifying leverage points (Meadows 1999, Abson et al. 2016) in order to find out how to effectively intervening in complex systems. While such a transformational academic approach means a greater entanglement of science with the political sphere, transformational researchers should systematically reflect the impacts of their practices, regarding the risks and borders of scientific evidence, indicator-based research projects and the tendencies of standardization and measurability in the sustainability and ESD policy context (Hursh et al. 2015, Bessant et al. 2015, Huckle/Wals 2015, McKenzie et al. 2015)?

This paper presentation will focus on the above-described tensions in terms of the science-policy interface in the context of ESD in Germany by presenting and discussing the preliminary results of the national ESD Global Action Program monitoring for Germany. Educational monitoring can be understood as a systematic and indicator-based observation of input-, output- and process aspects of an educational system for the reason of comparison and quality improvement (Ioannidou 2010: 163). The aim of a monitoring is to inform experts in highly relevant positions and the interested public (Döbert/ Weißhaupt 2012). The research project focuses on analyzing the status quo of the ESD-implementation in Germany as well as its development during the last five years. Thereby, it will show a differentiated picture of the extent and quality of ESD activities in six areas of the German educational system: early childhood education, school education, vocational education and training, higher education, education in the context of municipalities as well as informal and non-formal learning. The monitoring project is part of the Scientific Advisory Process of the Global Action Program in Germany by the Freie Universität Berlin and is closely connected to the expert groups and networks that were designed for the GAP as well as to the national Ministry of Education and Research in Germany as a project partner. The project results will be synthesized in recommendations for a more profound and effective implementation of ESD in the German educational system.

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