Master of Arts

The Sustainability Science and Practice program (SUST) is an interdisciplinary coterminal master’s program hosted by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. The program prepares leaders to radically accelerate the transition to a sustainable and just society. As the global human population climbs toward 10 billion, consumption demands increase, and disparities in wealth and opportunity persist, humanity must learn to equitably meet existing needs in ways that do not forgo possibilities for future generations. Sustainability challenges are marked by extreme complexity, urgency, conflicting demands, and often a lack of resources or political will to address them. Transforming these challenges into powerful opportunities requires a new type of leader who can envision a prosperous future for all and design practices and cultivate partnerships essential to building that future. The SUST program equips students with the theoretical and conceptual knowledge, mindsets, and practical skills needed to advance sustainability, securing human well-being worldwide and across generations.

Given the inherent interdisciplinary nature of sustainability challenges, SUST draws on diverse disciplines and pedagogical methods to prepare students as sustainability leaders. The curriculum encompasses and integrates: a) natural sciences, social sciences, and arts; b) theory and practice; and c) quantitative and qualitative methods. Through this integration, the program prepares students with a technical understanding of planetary functions, human-environment interactions, and global change, as well as the capacity to strategize and lead change in support of human and planetary well-being. 

Courses in the natural sciences enable students to understand Earth and the planetary changes occurring, while courses in the social sciences and arts develop students’ understanding of the social, economic, and policy factors that influence human capacity to drive transformative change. Theoretical frameworks prepare students to analyze complex social-environmental systems and conceptualize the nature of human-environment interactions. To learn how sustainability works (or does not work) in practice, students examine case studies, hear from expert practitioners, and apply tools and frameworks to real-world projects. Students learn quantitative methods to evaluate the status of social-ecological systems, monitor changes and impacts happening within them, track progress toward sustainability goals, and inform policy or intervention decisions with evidence. They learn qualitative methods to prepare them to understand human behavior, decision-making processes, cultural context, the values of diverse interest-holders, and system dynamics that cannot be fully captured with quantitative data. Together these approaches develop students’ identity, agency, capabilities and perspectives as sustainability leaders.

The SUST curriculum covers three main elements:

Element 1: Understanding Complex Social-Environmental Systems

Students develop a “systems perspective,” deepening their awareness of the dynamic and interrelated nature of social-environmental systems. They explore frameworks and tools to understand, measure, and map complex social-environmental systems and their interactions to recognize potential feedbacks, thresholds, and unintended consequences, as well as to identify leverage points and opportunities for interventions that advance sustainability.

Element 2: Understanding Decision-Making and Developing Strategies for Change

Students examine the roles of diverse actors influencing change in social-environmental systems and explore strategies to align decision-making and behavior with sustainability. They explore the mindsets and approaches of transformative leaders and examine effective strategies for advancing sustainability across sectors. Students develop decision-making skills in complex and uncertain contexts, use metrics and evaluation approaches aligned with sustainability goals, cultivate leadership orientations, and practice effective communications and storytelling approaches.

Element 3: Designing Innovations with Impact at Scale

Students develop an understanding of how to intervene in complex systems for transformative impact by exploring frameworks and tools from systems thinking, design thinking, social cognitive theory, behavioral economics, and partnership strategies. They develop practical skills to understand complexity, analyze root causes, and design high-leverage intervention pathways that realign systems with the goal of intergenerational well-being.

Sustainability Leadership Practicum

To integrate and internalize core lessons from the SUST curriculum, each student completes a 120-hour practicum project of their design, collaborating on a complex sustainability challenge with an outside partner and working through the constraints often faced by decision-makers and leaders. Students apply the curriculum’s leadership mindsets, knowledge, and skills to this practical experience and present their final analysis and reflections to faculty and peers.