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Background Despite the exponential growth of research on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in higher education, the field remains characterized by geographic concentration, methodological constraints, and conceptual fragmentation between established competence frameworks and emerging demands such as climate literacy and green skills. No prior review has simultaneously mapped the bibliometric architecture and conducted an AI-assisted inductive thematic synthesis of this domain. Methods A dual-method design integrated bibliometric network analysis—co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and keyword co-occurrence—with artificial intelligence-assisted inductive thematic synthesis. A total of 442 peer-reviewed documents were retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, and ERIC (2015–2026) through systematic search, deduplication, and PICO-based relevance screening. Thematic extraction was performed using two complementary large language model architectures (Qwen3-235B and DeepSeek V3.2), with a stringent hallucination-control verification protocol achieving a 92% alignment score; 37 hallucination flags were subjected to human expert review. Results The corpus exhibits exponential growth since 2019, with Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany accounting for over one-third of output. Five thematic clusters emerged: curriculum integration, transformative pedagogies, institutional and faculty roles, sustainability literacy and behavioral outcomes, and digital innovation. Surveys and case studies dominate research designs (38%), while experimental approaches represent only 4.0% of the corpus. Green skills and climate literacy remain conceptually peripheral despite their policy urgency, institutional collaboration is extremely fragmented (20.3% of institutions isolated), and faculty populations are severely understudied (7.0%) relative to students (32.7%). Fifty-six knowledge gaps were identified, with methods-by-concepts coverage reaching only 64.0%. Conclusions The field urgently requires a methodological pivot toward longitudinal and experimental designs, amplification of Global South scholarship, systematic pedagogical theorization of simulation-based approaches, and deliberate cross-institutional consortia to transition from conceptual proliferation to evidence-based pedagogical science.
Segura-Altamirano et al. (Tue,) studied this question.