Teaching sustainability through classroom experiments

Abstract

This research aims to present a proposal for an economic experiment for teaching sustainability in the classroom. Students, as active participants in experiments, can go beyond the purely theoretical framework, recognizing the dilemmas and outcomes arising from processes that require cooperation to preserve the environment. To this end, we used the experimental protocol adapted from Fehr and Gachter (2000), which consists of a twelve-round experiment, including the possibility of using economic incentives to foster cooperation for the benefit of a public good—in this case, a water reservoir. The main results include a discussion of conditional cooperation, the circumstances under which economic incentives are used to foster cooperation, and the dilemma between immediate individual gains and long-term collective gains. In the academic field, this work contributes to the debate regarding the use of economic experiments to reinforce learning in undergraduate courses, allowing students to directly experience the results of their decisions and the impact these can have on the environment. From a practical point of view, it promotes understanding of the cooperative decision-making process, especially how decisions involving individual and collective gains are made, in addition to encouraging multidisciplinary discussions, which are necessary to advance understanding of sustainability.

Key words: economic experiments; sustainability education; cooperation.