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Building sustainable societies through fostering engagement of higher education students

Building sustainable societies requires more than policy reform — it demands a transformation in the social values that guide how people live and act together. With less than five years remaining before the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals deadline, this project asks how higher education can play a more active role in fostering the civic engagement and shared values that sustainable futures depend on.

Working across LSE and Tsinghua University, this collaborative project focuses on university students as potential agents of cultural and behavioural change. Drawing on social psychology, communication studies, and social policy, the research explores how personal values, institutional practices, and media narratives shape students’ engagement with climate and sustainability issues — and what motivates them to act. Through interviews, focus groups, and a cross-cultural survey with students in London and Beijing, the project aims to build an empirically grounded model of how sustainable values form and spread — offering practical insights for educators, policymakers, and civic organisations. It is co-funded by the LSE–Tsinghua Sustainability Seed Research Fund and forms part of LSE’s Global School of Sustainability portfolio.

This project positions sustainability as a social and moral endeavour rooted in shared values. It seeks to understand how those values are formed, communicated, and acted upon within university communities across different cultural contexts.

Key research aims:

  • To explore how university students understand and articulate sustainable social values
  • To examine how institutional practices and media narratives shape students’ sense of responsibility and engagement with climate issues
  • To compare value formation processes across UK and Chinese higher education contexts
  • To identify what motivates meaningful student engagement in sustainability on and beyond campus
  • To generate evidence-based recommendations for educators, policymakers, and civic organisations

Co-Principal Investigators

Research Team (LSE)

Research Team (Tsinghua University)

  • Fangdan Zhang
  • Liming Liu
  • Mingjun Zhao
  • Qiupeng Wang
  • Chunyan Liu
  • Kangyu Qian
  • Qiaozhi Liang
  • Rong Shao
  • Xiaoxuan Wang
  • Yiting Miao
  • Yuanda Shi
  • Zhengxin Liu

Sustainability, Values and Higher Education — Early Findings
Monday 7 September 2026, 10.00am to 1.00pm
(Venue to be confirmed to attendees)

The event will present early findings from the Sustainability, Values and Higher Education research project at LSE and Tsinghua University, followed by discussion and lunch. We are keen to open up the project to as many perspectives as possible and hope the event will provide an opportunity to connect and collaborate.

If you would like to attend, please contact Jonny Brooks (j.j.brooks@lse.ac.uk) as soon as possible, as spaces are limited.

Students as Change-Makers: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue
Date TBC, October 2026
A student-facing workshop at Tsinghua University exploring sustainability and civic engagement.

LSE–Tsinghua University Sustainability Seed Research Fund (2026). £9,884 (LSE) + ¥90,000 RMB (Tsinghua). Project: Building sustainable societies through fostering engagement of higher education students.