ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on SHES institutional support and recognition. The introduction includes a critique of dysfunction of existing interdisciplinary environmental programs, which leads to the need for progress toward SHES program structure across educational institutions. The key critique points are (1) that higher education institutions are not providing the populace with basic ecological literacy, and are producing practitioners with skills mostly proscribed by the traditional disciplines and (2) major research funding is based on return-on-investment mentality and political agendas that are determinants of resource allocation among the disciplines within the university, leaving many areas of the humanities and social sciences struggling for recognition and even survival. The authors discuss small institutions as models as well as experiments at larger education institutions. For example, 3-year liberal arts institutions have the ability to be more nimble in their embrace of interdisciplinary environmental programming while several large institutions have created programs focused on the environment and our growing sustainability crisis. This is followed by a discussion of necessary structure for better integrative SHES programming. Finally there is a discussion of supradisciplinary institutional and SHES program recognition.
