Creating policy analysis skills in postgraduate engineering for sustainable development

Abstract A new sustainable development module for a taught postgraduate engineering course provided an opportunity to design and streamline taught content, using a constructivist model of student learning. The design process revealed that a key learning objective for a postgraduate engineering student must be the competency to analyse difficult social and political contexts. The success of meeting this need by introducing cognitive mapping, a technique previously used in operations research and social science, is reported.