As ESD is increasingly being implemented, questions of measuring its extent and quality are also getting more important. Thus, monitoring approaches are underlined in their relevance. Educational monitoring approaches are framed within the broader context of evidence based or evidence informed policy making (Lingard, 2013). They can be defined as an indicator-based and systematic observation of the input, output and process aspects of an education system for the purpose of comparison and quality improvement (Ioannidou, 2010). There is a plea for multi-methods designs in ESD monitoring projects (Stepanek Lockhart, 2018). At the same time many approaches still rely on self-reports (UNESCO 2017) and thereby miss independence and critical reflection (Nazir et al., 2009). For this reason, a crucial question is how to capture the extent, quality and development of ESD on different levels (documents, educational practices, public awareness etc.) in a methodologically robust and still context-specific way? More specifically, it is of interest, how to capture the regionally and historically varying manifestations of ESD as a result of broad multi-stakeholder processes (Feinstein, Jacobi, & Lotz-Sisitka, 2013) while at the same time aiming for interregional and international comparability of data.
The aim of the paper is to draw conclusions from a 4-year national monitoring of ESD from a meta perspective in terms of the possibilities and limitations of transferability to other (national) contexts. These conclusions are based on the design (theoretical foundations and applied methods) and the outcomes of the project. Within the implementation of the UNESCO GAP in Germany, the department of the scientific advisor was commissioned to design and conduct a national monitoring which aims at grasping the extent and quality for ESD in Germany as well as finding pathways to foster ESD. The research project covers different educational areas (early childhood education, school education, vocational education and training, higher education, non-formal learning organizations as well as local authorities). It encompassed multiple methods: a document analysis, expert interviews as well as a quantitative study.
Overall, the results indicate the following:
1) ESD has been increasingly implemented on the level of documents, but varies between the different federal states of Germany, the educational areas, and specific subjects or disciplines(Singer-Brodowski et al., 2018). Furthermore, the findings show that ESD has been identified as the most widely used educational concept compared to related ones (environmental education, global learning etc.) (van Poeck, Vandenabeele, & Bruyninckx, 2013).
2) Expert interviews revealed several diffusion pathways of ESD in the last years that are divergent in the different educational areas. The less formal educational areas (early childhood education, non-formal learning organizations and local authorities) seem to be more responsive towards the uptake of ESD than the more formal ones. In all educational areas, the diffusion of ESD is taking place within the interplay of the social innovation ESD (Bormann, 2013) and its innovation environment (Singer-Brodowski, Etzkorn, & von Seggern, 2019).
3) A quantitative study reveals that young people as well as teachers wish for much more (E)SD in their educational areas. Both groups regard a tripling of SD-references in their educational settings as ideal. These findings demonstrate that recipients and educators are in general motivated to implement ESD. In contrast to the desired extent to ESD, the young people and the teachers report that the current implementation encompasses only a small share of the classes and is dependent on specific subjects and single engaged educators (Grund & Brock, 2018).
The current research activities encompass the repetition of the document analysis, focus group discussions about the governance of ESD and the combination of a quantitative approach with a self-evaluation tool for non-formal learning organizations.
