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This study examines how young people’s aspirations for the future (“wishes”) relate to their perceived threats and uncertainties (“worries”), and what this relationship implies for sustainability engagement. Although youth are often framed as essential actors in addressing sustainability challenges, the authors argue that immediate personal priorities and anxieties can shape whether (and how) young people orient toward collective issues. Using the Youth Talks international survey (2022–2023), the study analyzes two open-ended questions about what youth are not willing to give up for their envisioned futures and what collective issues must be addressed to build the future they want.

The research uses a large, multi-country dataset of youth aged 15–29, collected through digital and in-person modes across multiple languages. Responses were cleaned, then grouped into thematic clusters for both wishes and worries. The clustering process combined semantic grouping with iterative human review and validation to strengthen consistency in categorisation. The final analytical sample comprises 15,076 respondents across 177 countries and territories. The authors then apply multinomial logistic regression to estimate how different aspiration themes are associated with the likelihood of expressing different types of worries.

Findings show a notable pattern: aspirations focused on career progression, professional success, and personal economic security tend to be associated with lower reported concerns across many global challenges (including environmental, societal, and geopolitical issues). In contrast, aspirations oriented toward education, social contribution, or a “better world” tend to be associated with higher awareness and concern about environmental and social problems. The authors interpret this as
evidence that many youth view personal stability as a prerequisite for sustained engagement with broader sustainability challenges. 

Conceptually, the paper proposes an “economic platform” layer in motivational terms, extends the theory of planned behavior by emphasizing perceived global efficacy, and connects social identity processes with economic psychology to explain why achievement-oriented identities can reduce attention to socioecological obligations.

This article examines how business schools in the Global South navigate the tensions inherent in Responsible Management Education (RME), particularly when sustainability commitments collide with pressures for employability, institutional viability, and market relevance. Rather than treating these tensions as problems to be solved through linear “best practice,” the authors frame them as paradoxes that must be actively managed over time, and argue that Global South realities can intensify these contradictions. 

Using a Malaysian business school as a case, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach to surface both the patterns and the lived reasoning behind them. Quantitatively, the authors surveyed 543 business students and incorporated six items adapted from the PRME–MGSM Global Survey (2018) to enable comparison with an international student sample. Qualitatively, they conducted five focus group discussions with 35 participants, including educators and students, to deepen understanding of why particular values and trade-offs emerge in context. 

Findings highlight that economic priorities remain highly salient for students, and that profit-oriented beliefs can be more pronounced in the Malaysian context than in the global PRME comparison group. The integrated analysis identifies an overarching economic–environmental/social responsibility paradox, alongside related tensions that operate simultaneously across levels: individual aspirations versus institutional constraints, and globalization pressures versus localization needs. The authors emphasize that these paradoxes do not sit neatly at one level; they are nested across macro (institutional environment), meso (business school structures and strategy), and micro (student and educator identities, motivations, and expectations). 

To respond, the article proposes a multi-level framework for RME that helps educators and leaders map where paradoxes emerge and how they interact.