Abstract
The Mediterranean is among the regions most exposed to climate change, environmental degradation and socio-economic inequality, and the interaction of these pressures raises demanding questions for education policy. This conceptual and policy-oriented paper examines how education systems in the region could contribute to resilient, equitable and climate-neutral development while strengthening their international standing. It develops the concept of sustainable competitiveness in education, understood as the capacity of an education system to generate durable social, economic and environmental value while maintaining international attractiveness and institutional resilience, and articulates the concept through five interrelated dimensions concerning learning quality and sustainability-related competencies, equity of access and inclusion, internationalization and mobility, innovation and labor-market relevance, and environmentally responsible and climate-neutral institutional operations. Building on this framework, the paper proposes a Mediterranean Education Hub, a regional knowledge ecosystem that would connect universities, research centers, vocational providers and policy institutions under shared governance arrangements oriented towards sustainability. The governance conditions, policy instruments and evaluation indicators through which such a hub could be pursued are then discussed. The paper contributes a framework in which sustainability and competitiveness in education are treated as mutually reinforcing objectives, together with a policy architecture through which regional cooperation in Mediterranean education could be organized.
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