Scaffolding Sustainability: Critical Thinking for SDG Achievement

Abstract

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals represent humanity’s most comprehensive framework for addressing deeply interconnected global challenges, yet progress on more than half of all targets remains insufficient. This chapter argues that the implementation gap is, in part, a cognitive problem that reflects a mismatch between the analytical demands of sustainability challenges and the thinking capacities cultivated by conventional higher education. Based on a narrative review of recent scholarly literature at the intersection of critical thinking and sustainability education, the chapter examines how universities can integrate critical thinking (CrT) pedagogies with SDG-focused curricula and proposes the Critical Thinking Scaffolding for SDG Achievement (CrTS-SDG) model as a conceptual framework for that integration. The analysis identifies five clusters of evidence-based pedagogical strategies, documents a structured asymmetry between which SDGs receive sustained pedagogical attention and which remain underserved, and advances a central argument: the depth of genuine CrT–sustainability co-integration depends less on the choice of pedagogical strategy than on the underlying conceptualization of sustainable development that a given program presupposes. To improve the quality of sustainability education, this conceptualization must itself become an object of critical inquiry.