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The paper aims to provide a conceptual map of how to mediate between sustainability theory and practice in higher education and how disciplinary divides can be bridged. It further looks at issues linked to knowledge views and drivers for institutional change that affect opportunities for whole institution development promoting action preparedness.

Taking its point of departure in the University Educators for Sustainable Development report UE4SD (2014, 2015), the paper discusses ways that ideas and interaction can be mediated in higher education settings, to connect sustainability research with vocational programmes. Different options are considered and compared.

Although the literature stresses both action orientation and the need for holistic transdisciplinary approaches, many institutional drivers limit opportunities for more integrating approaches.

However, while conclusions may hold for universities at an overarching level, it is likely that certain research and teaching environments have been able to transcend such barriers.

Conceptually mapping the different forms that dialogue, interaction and flows of ideas take within higher education institutions has relevance for whole institution development for sustainability.

Importantly, producing sustainability science with relevance to practice in various professions is a fundamental condition to support accelerated transitions to sustainability at societal levels.

The paper makes a significant contribution by focusing on concrete institutional pathways for knowledge exchange and negotiation that can support education for sustainability in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a synopsis of some major trends that have marked discussions on global learning for sustainable development (GLSD) in higher education. The aim is formulated against the background of the complexity represented in GLSD, as well as the fact that sustainable development (SD) is an issue of global interest for universities.

The authors conducted an overview in recent trends in research on GLSD in higher education over the last 20 years, based on the combination of the keyword higher education for Sustainable Development with global learning (GL) and global education.

The overview suggests that only relatively limited steps have been implemented to achieve GLSD, and rhetoric still dominates the discussions. It appears that little empirical research has been undertaken on learning in global settings. Several authors have identified the need for a competence‐based curriculum for GLSD.

Universities, professionals and students need to take greater responsibility. How knowledge, values and abilities are formed and developed from the global learner's perspective therefore, remains an open and fundamental question. The paper underlines the crucial role that higher education plays in GL for sustainability.

In their endless quest for self-devotion, the elite, the powerful, often seek to appropriate the most beautiful and impressive things. As Thorstein Veblen (1899, p. 36) put it: “In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient to merely possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.” Looking at it in these terms, pomp and prestige prove to be necessary elements for “upholding one’s rank.” Many authors have acknowledged that Veblen was the first to give a systematic sociological interpretation of “conspicuous behaviour.” However he has often been criticized for taking on a rather puritan and incriminating tone. For his part, Norbert Elias (1974, pp. 48–49) reproaches Veblen for not managing to understand the behavioural logics and the mentalities of societies different from the (American-bourgeois) one he was analysing. Moreover, Elias quite rightly points out that in industrialized societies, one is able to preserve great prestige without providing public proof for it through costly display. Social pressure for prestigious consumption would no longer have the unavoidable character it used to have (particularly within court society) and would take on a much more private one (Elias, 1974, pp. 54–55). Even if this statement often proves to be true, it is also an over-generalization.