Education for Advancing the Implementation of the Bioeconomy Goals: An Analysis of Master Study Programmes in Bioeconomy

Abstract

Bioeconomy in Europe has become one of the leading courses for sustainable and resource-efficient development. Main aspects of bioeconomy: development of new technologies and processes, development of markets and competitiveness for bioeconomy can be implemented through higher education and transformative knowledge for building a sustainable bioeconomy. Over the past year, new bioeconomy-related Master study programmes have been created and have integrated bioeconomy goals into their research, programme aims and learning outcomes. During the research the set of competences based on sustainable development competences and bioeconomy competences have been created. The integration of competences for bioeconomy development in higher education can be seen as an important step in transformation towards knowledge-based bioeconomy. On this basis, 10 Master study programmes across Europe were analysed in order to find out the actual integration of competences in different study programmes for bioeconomy. Results of the analysis show that transdisciplinary competence, learning competence, interdisciplinary competence and system-thinking competence are strongly integrated into the study programmes. The analysis also shows that the integration of other competences, like anticipatory competence, normative competence, strategic competence and interpersonal competence can be improved in the future.

Keywords

• sustainable higher education
• competences
• green innovation
• bioeconomy integration assessment