Latin American Knowledge Production on Education for Sustainable Development: An Analysis of Policy Documents Using the Overton Software

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play an important role in achieving Sustainable Development, especially due to their efforts in producing and disseminating knowledge oriented toward solving problems involving social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Therefore, this study aims to understand and analyze to what extent Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been addressed in Latin American policy documents, considering the regional knowledge production on the subject. Methodologically, in addition to the literature review, the software Overton.io was used to identify policy documents that address ESD and content analysis, being linked to a qualitative-quantitative approach. As for the preliminary results, among the 253,389 Latin American policy documents in the platform, only 279 (0.11%) explicitly mention the term “Education for Sustainable Development”. From the data collected and the analysis developed, it was possible to observe that this low percentage of policy documents dealing with ESD may be connected to the absence of a consensus in the literature on the term ESD, that is, of a clear definition that could work as a starting point for the formulation of public policies.