SUCCESS – Supporting University Capacities in building Centres of Excellence in Sustainability Science – is an jointly built project of Vietnamese and European partners to develop a new model where eight Vietnamese institutions will design and develop Centres of Excellence in Sustainability Science (CoESS), in cooperation with IRD, France; IEDC-Bled, Slovenia; Pantopicon, Belgium; and Maastricht University, the Netherlands. These institutions are: Dalat University, the University of Da Nang, the University of Can Tho, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, the Institute for Regional Sustainable Development, Hanoi Architectural University, Thuyloi University and Vietnam National University of Hanoi.

Within the context of these CoESS, scientists and stakeholders will jointly address sustainability challenges and real-world cases, relying on the use of innovative methods and tools to encourage participation and co-creation of sustainable solutions.

The project will be organised around tailored training weeks during which the four European and eight Vietnamese partners will interact and collaborate directly on Sustainability Science methodologies. The training of academic staff and the exchange of students and teachers between the centres will be supported by a set of tangible and measurable outcomes, the most important of which will be:

  1. The CoESS themselves, designed to have long-term impact as “hubs” for sustainability challenges and as inspiration for the creation of a wider network in Vietnam (and Southeast Asia) to promote sustainability science approaches.
  2. The design of a “CoESS toolkit”, an open-source participatory decision support game, to help researchers and university decision-makers know in a structured way what choices to make to build similar centres around specific sustainability topics,
  3. The design of a “training toolkit”, based on Sustainability Science approaches, methods and tools, in the form of a compilation of the training material used during the two years of the project and the good practices drawn from the case studies, to provide methodological support to future centres.

SUCCESS has been submitted under the Call of the Erasmus+ Programme, Key Action 2, Capacity Building in the field of education.