Practising Students’ SDG Strategies through Fieldwork: Conflictual landscapes or sustainable land transformations in a Nature Park?

This paper focuses on practising the SDGs and visions for local community development to foster sustainability education. A growing number of students demand knowledge on more sustainable practices and climate change actions from their education. This paper argues that although SDGs can be hard to implement and put into practice, geographical fieldwork methods are well suited to the study of planning implementation efforts. The paper is based on a case study of students’ perceptions of a former wetland in a Danish nature park. The case study area is strategically selected being the drained wetland in Denmark and major carbon source. Thus, the case area places students in the midst of local-global conflicting SDG viewpoints held by different stakeholders, as changed land use over the course of the last 100 years have changed the areas climate profile. This constitutes a centrepiece in practising the SDGs through fieldwork. Students map landowners and citizens local socio-environmental representations and we identify environmental blindness among students’ SDG strategies as a learning strategy, not least when it comes to understanding the multi-scalar character of the SDGs and their assessment of the (dis)proportionality between different planning proposals, landowners’ and citizens’ natural-cultural representation of the area, and potential effects for more sustainable land transformation.