This paper aimed to examine residents’ attitudes and perceptions of the social and cultural impacts of the 2022 FIFA World Cup and to understand the legacy dimensions of this sport event in Qatar. Drawing on social exchange theory, this paper reports results from survey data comprising 1018 nationals and 1014 expatriates who participated in the Survey of Perceptions and Attitudes towards the 2022 FIFA World Cup conducted in 2019 in Qatar. An impact scale comprising 21 social and cultural impact items was used to elicit participants’ responses. Results from ANOVA indicated that nationality matters with respect to perceived significant predictors of the World Cup. Results revealed that residents, national and expatriates, were supportive of hosting the event in Qatar but were concerned over traffic, pollution, price increases, and the potential rise in the overall cost of living. The paper concludes with implications for mega-sports events and future research are proposed.

This paper investigates the localization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of an interconnected, multi-scale world. As global challenges intensify, policy frameworks must navigate the complex intersection of social, economic, and environmental threats to human development. The United Nations SDGs offer a common language and a roadmap with a standard set of development indicators. However, the current lack of progress reveals the need for context-specific implementations of this universal model reflecting and responding to local realities, challenges, and capacities. By combining a systematic literature review with qualitative and quantitative coding via MAXQDA, this study applies grounded theory to analyze how the growing body of research conceptualizes and operationalizes SDG localization. The findings identify key mechanisms, themes, and case studies that illustrate how SDGs are adapted to local contexts. The analysis highlights the critical role of agency, emphasizing that localization is not merely a top-down implementation but a dynamic process that aligns global goals with local governance structures, actors, and tools to foster ownership and long-term impact. Importantly, the study underscores that cities and local governance entities are not just sites of implementation but active drivers of SDG adaptation, serving as crucial policy spheres that transform a global agenda into concrete local action.

Teachers play an essential role in teaching sustainable development to students. Consequently, understanding the challenges that hamper effective instruction is crucial. This study explored the challenges preparatory and secondary school teachers face in Qatar’s public and private schools when teaching Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Global Citizenship Education (GCED). The study utilized an adapted version of UNESCO’s global survey to investigate these challenges and shed light on the obstacles that impede effective instruction in these essential domains. Teachers’ (N = 981) challenges were assessed according to curricular, cultural, and environmental challenges associated with teaching sustainability. The study results indicated that more than half of public and private school teachers faced moderate to significant challenges when teaching ESD and/or GCED themes. Sustainable Consumption and Production was perceived as the most challenging teaching theme, with the least curriculum coverage. Results indicated that private school teachers report more significant challenges in teaching and assessing ESD/GCED themes than public school teachers across the four sustainability themes. Detailed discussion regarding these findings is provided. This article contributes to the wider academic conversation by examining the practical challenges teachers face in Qatar as they implement ESD and GCED.

This study explored the development of teacher leadership in collaborative online spaces, also called virtual communities of practice (vCoP). Employing a phenomenological research design with semi-structured interviews as the primary data collection method, participants were drawn from a single vCoP. The findings underscored the pivotal role of vCoPs in nurturing teacher leadership skills, facilitated by the dynamic interplay of teacher agency and distributed leadership. Teacher agency empowers educators to proactively take control of their learning journey within vCoPs, enabling them to explore areas of personal interest and expertise, including knowledge sharing and project initiation. Simultaneously, distributed leadership empowers teachers to assume leadership roles within the vCoP, irrespective of their formal positions or seniority, involving activities such as guiding discussions and organizing professional development. This harmonious collaboration between teacher agency and distributed leadership fosters a collaborative and inclusive environment within vCoPs, where teacher leadership thrive.

This study aims to provide a general overview of how educational leadership is defined by Arab educators and education specialists in the Arab region, concentrating on the State of Qatar. The study builds on insights from socio-cultural theory and critical discourse analysis, viewing language as a social practice and thus treats leadership as a form of discursive practice. The study draws on grounded theory and adopts a socio-cultural perspective employing semi-structured interviews conducted with school principals, teachers, educators, educational leaders, educational researchers, and members of the community in Qatar. The results concluded from this study disclose discording views of educational leadership and how it is defined, owing to borrowing the concept from Western educational system models, either by using these terms verbatim or as they are lost in translation. This discord reflects a lack of clarity in using the relevant educational leadership concepts and has arguably led to differences in educational practices and educators’ dispositions and perspectives. Finally, the study concludes with valuable recommendations for educational policy and decision-making and some suggestions for future research.

This study sought to explore the factors that help predict students’ interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in Qatar. Drawing on recent work in the field, the present paper examines the intersection of personal characteristics (gender and grade level) and contextual...