Teaching EU Sustainability Policies: Conveying complexity and managing shifting policy priorities

Although sustainability is broadly recognised as an essential part of the university curriculum, conveying the complexities of EU sustainability policy to students poses many challenges for instructors. Existing courses often focus on small parts of the sustainability puzzle, such as climate, energy, transport, or cohesion policies. Yet, there is a need to address sustainability more comprehensively. Action in one policy area alone is not sufficient to address the triple planetary crisis. Even more, actions across individual policy areas are highly intertwined. It is thus insufficient and short-sighted to think in sectoral silos and to introduce students only to the specificities of specific silos, while losing sight of the complex system of interacting policies. At the same time, policy developments like the 2019 European Green Deal have facilitated a more holistic approach to teaching the EU’s policy agenda. In 2025, however, this EU sustainability policy agenda is put into question, adding another layer to teaching on EU policy developments. This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of teaching with a comprehensive sustainability perspective (in conceptual and empirical terms) and how EU sustainability policies work more concretely. We build on the experiences of two Master-level courses on EU Sustainability Policy/Governance taught at KU Leuven (BE) and at ESPOL (FR), including the practice of organizing joint student symposiums for both groups. We reflect on curriculum choices, student experiences (surveys, focus groups, etc.), and teaching methods, building on insights of the Jean Monnet Module NaviSustainability. In doing so, we bridge and contribute to two strands of the literature, namely the literature on innovative teaching methods in European Studies (e.g., Gravey & Huggins 2024) and the literature on the impact of sustainability teaching in higher education (e.g., Shah et al. 2022, Filho et al. 2025).