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"The authoress focuses on technical and vocational higher education and analyses the rationales behind the emergence of this particular type of higher education institution in Colombia and Mexico. Based on concepts of diversification of institutional types and growing diversity of the student body in the face of massification of higher education, the authoress reports the main strains of controversial international debates since the 1960s pertaining to the emergence of a non-university sector. She sketches the development of short-cycle technical and vocational higher education in Mexico and Colombia working out the differences and similarities in role and function. She emphasizes the rather low social acceptance of this type of higher education provision compared to traditional universities and Looks at how its graduates fare on the labor market. And while in Colombia technical and vocational higher education is following a process of academic drift by upgrading itself, Mexico has made considerable progress in improving the quality of such provisions. In both countries, the sector has served to not only fulfill policy goals of expansion and equity of access but to also meet newly emerging needs of the respective labor markets. But in both countries many social prejudices against this type of higher education continue to exist. The authoress concludes that technical and vocational higher education is as yet a poorly researched issue in both countries and that Colombia in particular needs more targeted policies for the role of technical and vocational education in achieving its social and economic goals." (excerpt)

The paper presents first reflections related to different countries' characteristics as a precondition for carrying out the Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator, a three-year project in seven countries (Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Mexico, India). The aim of the project is to set up a web platform that enables households to adopt a household-level transition methodology towards sustainable footprints including the following five stages: monitoring consumption, footprint calculation, choice of measures, building a roadmap towards 2030, and a month of experimenting. The project started in 2018 with five to ten households in each country, and is going to be expanded to 500 households per country in 2018 and 10,000 per country in 2019. With more than 70,000 participating households the Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator will require a complex and versatile web-based platform in order to still ensure that the households will be able to go through the whole process from footprint calculation up to experimenting. This paper discusses the preconditions for applying the Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator's webtool in a large number of countries. On the basis of the first round of the project, different countries' characteristics in terms of households' preferences and mindsets, as well as political, infrastructural and private sector's ability to enable sustainable lifestyles were analysed and compared. The results show that there can be huge differences not only in terms of affinity and connectedness to web-based solutions but also in terms of mindset towards reducing lifestyle footprints to a sustainable level, trust in different institutions, and the ability of other stakeholders to enable sustainable lifestles. The paper concludes with a set of prerequisites to be taken into consideration when planning a web-based platform like the Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator. ; The paper presents first reflections related to different countries' characteristics as a precondition for carrying out the ...