Purpose: To distinguish sustainable development education from environmental education and stress the importance of problem‐based interdisciplinary learning to sustainable development education.Design/methodology/approach: A range of published works relating to sustainable development education are critiqued, an introduction to complexity theory is given and related to sustainable development education, and a case study is provided to demonstrate an example of incorporating sustainability into course delivery and to demonstrate problem‐based interdisciplinary learning.Findings: Our discussion supports our claim that reconciling sustainability and development requires a complex interdisciplinary approach beyond that found in some areas of traditional environmental education.Research limitations/implications: Our literature search is not exhaustive and focuses on sustainable development education. A much greater body of literature relating to environmental education exists.Practical implications: Our discussion and case study suggests practitioners designing and teaching sustainable development related programs should incorporate an interdisciplinary approach and allow for problem‐based applied learning to take place.Originality/value: This paper distinguishes sustainable development education from environmental education and suggests practical courses of action for initiating sustainable development education in a meaningful manner.

Although community social networks can build resilience, and thus, aid adaptation to unexpected environmental change (Tomkins and Adger 2004), not all social networks are created equal. Networks composed of a diversity of "bridging" links to a diverse web of resources and "bonding" links that build trust strengthen a community's ability to adapt to change, but networks composed only of "bonding" links can impose constraining social norms and foster group homophily, reducing resilience. Diversity fosters the resilience needed to adapt to unexpected change, and can also enlarge the ability to proactively make collective decisions that optimize future options

Research in Canada and Australia has shown that social capital is a necessary condition for sustainable community development as it enhances linking ties that increase access to resources outside the community. Social capital in and of itself, however, is not always sufficient to sustain and develop local community initiatives, as infusions of economic and human capital are often necessary; the larger ‘social safety net’ can play a critical role in local community development initiatives. More importantly, government policy alignment may be critical to establish a stable environment within which organizations can sustain and increase the scale of their operations. Governments have a critical leadership role to play by re-aligning policies and incentives to complement the existing social capital network formation by strategically targeting their interventions at pivotal points in the evolution of local organizations to optimize their access to outside economic and human resources. The role of government is explored in a case study outlining the actions of a local community initiative in a marginalized neighbourhood of Vancouver, Canada.

Many brownfield development projects and many redevelopment projects aimed at improving older urban spaces list sustainable development as a stated goal. It is a key question, however, whether the benefits of these redevelopment projects are equitably shared with the original members of the community, and in the case of brownfields with residents of adjacent neighbours, or are there differential benefits that accrue to new higher-income residents at the expense of current residents and retailers, and at the expense of existing community diversity? A case study of a brownfield development in Victoria, Canada, confirms concerns in the literature about income diversity in brownfield developments; a second case study of a Toronto neighbourhood suggests that there is no guarantee that local sustainable development projects within existing neighbourhoods will encourage or even maintain existing social diversity and equity. A similar trend is demonstrated in a series of infill projects that had profound ramifications on adjacent communities and indeed contributed to greater unsustainability in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia. It is concluded that the relationship between sustainable development and gentrification is more complex than has been previously suggested.

In this paper we question the importance of social capital as a primary indicator of a community's ability to engage in sustainable development as social capital can have both hindering and facilitating effects. We suggest that actor agency allows an individual or group to increase access to other critical forms of capital to overcome barriers and solve problems. We present ‘bonding’ social capital consisting of strong network ties as a negative in excess quantity as it can lead to the enforcement of social norms that hinder innovative change, and ‘bridging’ social capital consisting of weak network ties as a benefit that allows actors to bring about critical social changes. Communities achieve agency through a dynamic mix of bonding and bridging ties. We close with suggestions for fostering community agency and flag the need for further research in this area.